Telegram has observed a surge in users ever since WhatsApp’s new privacy policy has come under the radar.
WhatsApp, meantime, noticed downloads shrink to 10.6 million, down from 12.7 million the week before.
The company has exceeded over 500 million users. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov stated in his channel that 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours. Users have moved to Signal and Telegram as uncertainty around WhatsApp’sWhatsApp’s new privacy policy declined to settle.
“In the January first week, Telegram exceeded 500 million monthly active users. After that, it kept growing: 25 million new users Installed Telegram in the last 72 hours alone. These across the globe 38% from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America, from across the globe, and 8% from MENA. This is an important increase linked to last year when 1.5M new users signed up every day. We’veWe’s had surges of downloads before, throughout our 7-year history of preserving user privacy. But this time is different,” Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.
With sharp clarity over what the new policies mean, users across the globe cut chords with WhatsApp and moved to other messaging apps that seemed more secure than WhatsApp.
Taking a mean dig at WhatsApp for its new policies, Pavel wrote in his channel, “People no longer desire to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer need to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as their apps have a critical mass of users. Unlike other popular apps, Telegram doesn’t have shareholders or advertisers to report to. We don’t do deals with marketers, data miners, or government agencies. Since the day we started in August 2013 we haven’t disclosed a single byte of our users private data to third parties.”
However, WhatsApp, in his statement, issued a clarification and said some of the most-asked questions. WhatsApp messaging app has stated that the policy update does not affect users’ privacy with friends or family.
WhatsApp has announced that the messaging app can neither recognize your private messages nor hear your calls, and neither can Facebook. It does not retain logs of who everyone is messaging or calling. The Facebook-owned messaging app cannot see your shared location and not can Facebook.
Sensor Tower predicts that Signal has been installed about 58.6 million times globally since 2014. Also, Telegram has seen about 755.2 million installations and WhatsApp a whopping 5.6 billion almost eight times as numerous as Telegram Installs.
WhatsApp is yet by far the most famous messaging app, and so far, there’s no indication of a mass exodus.