Signal records a growth in downloads in India, Whatsapp faces burns

WhatsApp’s changed terms and conditions and revealed new privacy policy has shifted its user base to instant messaging apps Signal and Telegram. Both the apps have witnessed almost four million downloads in India. According to Sensor Tower data, Signal is leading the pack with 2.3 million new downloads between January 6 and January 10, while Telegram clocked 1.5 million new downloads over the same period.

Comparatively, Signal and Telegram had 24,000 and 1.3 million downloads respectively between January 1 and January 5. With the new downloads, Signal grew by 9,483% while Telegram grew by 15%.

Also, WhatsApp faced downloads by 35% over the January 6 to January 10 time period with 1.3 million new downloads.

Between January 1 to January 5, WhatsApp had clocked 2 million new downloads. Lifetime downloads (all downloads since the app was launched in 2014) for Signal in India stands at 3.9 million and it is 151.5 million for Telegram. On the other hand, for WhatsApp is a whopping 1.4 billion downloads over the same period.

WhatsApp, till date has been tasting popularity, but now with changed privacy policy, despite the platform's disclaimers and explanations, it has to taste failure too, as many users have decided to shift to other messaging options.

Signal and Telegram are being considered as viable replacements for WhatsApp with Elon Musk being one of the first to tweet that people should shift to Signal.

Following Musk’s tweet, which went out to all his 42 million followers, Signal tweeted to say that Verification codes were delayed across several providers because so many new people were trying to join. In India, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma also asked followers to pick Signal over WhatsApp as he criticized the latter on Twitter.

WhatsApp recently updated its terms of service on January 6 informing users that information from all interactions with businesses on WhatsApp will be shared with Facebook and companies it owns and the businesses themselves. WhatsApp has mentioned that this does not apply to personal chats, but people are clearly not convinced.

Pavel Durov, Telegram founder took to his own channel on the platform to promise that the Telegram will never collect users’ private data or profile them for ad targeting. Durov also added that if Telegram ever chose to advertise, it would do so through one-to-many channels, which do not require specific user profiling.