Signal has a moment.
Over the past few days, it has become the number one free app in the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, mainly due to three things that were out of its control. The first was the move by both Facebook and Twitter to block President Trump from their platforms, which drove many of his supporters to look for alternatives
Then one of the alternatives, Parler, was removed from their respective app stores by both Apple and Google due to information that some users of the legal-friendly social media app linked to the attack on the US Capitol building. Parler later went completely offline when Amazon terminated its AWS account.
Finally, WhatsApp updated its privacy policy earlier this week, requiring users to agree to share information with Facebook before using the app. The confusion surrounding the change and the mismanagement of the deployment caused people to worry that it was just another Facebook grab. In response, Elon Musk tweeted ‘Use Signal’ to his 42 million followers.
As a result, people flocked to the encrypted messaging program, which is supported by the Non-Profit Signal Foundation. On Monday alone, Signal Messenger was downloaded by more than 1.5 million users. According to Sensor Tower, which provides the analysis of mobile applications, Signal was downloaded 17.8 million times during the week of January 5th. This is quite extraordinary for an app that has averaged about 50,000 downloads per day.
The increase in downloads has even caused problems with Signal’s authentication system, causing delays in setting up accounts for new users.
Signal is still the underdog.
WhatsApp is still the most popular messaging application, with over 2 billion users per month, despite the recent mess of privacy policies. On the other hand, at the end of last year, Signal had about 20 million app installations, according to App Annie, an app analytics platform.
The reason, however, is that the diverse group of users suddenly came across Signal has much more to do with what happened long before last week. This is important because even though millions of people hear it for the first time, it did not just suddenly appear out of nowhere.
Signal’s previous moment in the spotlight came during Black Lives Matter protests during the summer. At the time, it was a reflection of the app’s popularity among activists, journalists, and other security users, who value the fact that signal messages are never stored on the platform’s servers and are only decrypted by the intended end user. can be.
An overnight success, years in the making.
Signal is co-founder of Brian Acton, who also founded WhatsApp. After Facebook acquired the latter, Acton left and created the non-profit organization to develop an open source coding protocol, which – ironically – was later also adopted by WhatsApp.
One major difference, however, is that Signal’s privacy protection is good enough that when the company had to hand over information about a user through a summons from a large jury, the only information available was the date the account was created, and the date of last activity. There was no information at all about the user’s messages or contacts.
Even if someone could intercept an encrypted message, it simply looks like a mess. Only the intended recipient, with the correct security key, can decrypt it. Signal encrypts all conversations by default. You can not turn it off, not even if you wanted to.
This is different from another app that has been running for a whole week. At the same time as Signal, Telegram launched the number two app in the iOS App Store, with more than 400 million users. Telegram does provide end-to-end coding, but it is out of standard and cannot be used on channels on the platform.
Privacy is in the spotlight.
If nothing else, it’s a good thing that people are starting to notice the way many social media platforms treat your personal information. While WhatsApp’s new privacy policy is actually not much different than before, the fact that people are so concerned is an indication of how they feel about big tech companies like Facebook, which deserves your personal information as a business model.
Signal is different, not just because it has fine cryptography that protects your conversations, but because it is set up to be different from the start. The company does not show ads. It does not sell your information. It does not even require money. As a non-profit, it exists for a purpose and is supported by donations.