OAKLAND, California (AP) – Encrypted messaging programs Signal and Telegram are seeing huge increases in downloads from Apple and Google’s app stores. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, on the other hand, is seeing its growth decline after a failure that forced the company to clear up a privacy update it sent to users.
Mobile app analytics firm Sensor Tower said Wednesday Signal saw 17.8 million app downloads on Apple and Google during the week of Jan. 5 through Jan. 12. This is a 61-fold increase of just 285,000 the previous week. Telegram, an already popular messaging program for people around the world, saw 15.7 million downloads in the period from 5 to 12 January, about twice the 7.6 million downloads it saw last week.
WhatsApp, meanwhile, saw downloads shrink to 10.6 million, up from 12.7 million the previous week.
Experts believe the move could reflect a rush of conservative social media users looking for alternatives to platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the now-closed-right website Parler. The mainstream websites suspended President Donald Trump last week and intensified the use of violent incitement and hate speech.
Parler, meanwhile, was taken off the internet without ceremony after Apple and Google banned it from their app stores because they did not have the moderate incitement. Amazon then cut Parler off from its cloud hosting service. Experts are concerned that these steps could lead to more ideological fragmentation and further hide extremism in the dark corners of the internet, making it more difficult to detect and counter.
WhatsApp did itself no favors when users recently said that if they did not adopt a new privacy policy on February 8, they would be cut off. The notice refers to the data that WhatsApp shares with Facebook, which is admittedly not entirely new, but that some users may have hit it that way.
Confusion over notification, complicated by Facebook’s history of privacy accidents, forced WhatsApp to make the update clear to users this week. The company said that updating it did not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family, adding that the policy changes were necessary to enable users to send businesses on WhatsApp. The notice “provides further transparency about how we collect and use data,” the company said.
WhatsApp is still the most popular messaging app of the three, and so far there is no evidence of a mass exodus. Sensor Tower estimates that Signal has been installed approximately 58.6 million times worldwide since 2014. Telegram saw around 755.2 million installations in the same period, and WhatsApp a whopping 5.6 billion – almost eight times as many as Telegram.