These apps saw on average 30% more active users than the alternatives. “Messaging apps that provide privacy features saw the greatest engagement growth in 2020. The shift to more privacy-focused messaging apps had been building before WhatsApp’s public relations disaster, Ghodrati said. We’ve seen growing demand over the last few years for encrypted messaging and apps focused on privacy.” Due to the nature of social apps and how the primary functionality involves communicating with others, their growth can often move quite quickly, based on current events. “These types of shifts in messaging and social networking apps are not unusual. The company says it will delay the implementation of its new policy until 15 May.Īpp Annie’s director of market insights, Amir Ghodrati, said moving quickly was important. “We want to be clear that the policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family in any way,” WhatsApp said in an update posted to its site, which it is paying to advertise on Google under searches for “WhatsApp privacy policy”.

“There are no changes to our data sharing with Facebook anywhere in the world,” Sweeney said.īut after viral posts – ironically, widely spread on WhatsApp – claimed that the privacy policy instead gave the service the right to read users’ messages and hand the information over to its parent company Facebook, WhatsApp announced a delay in the implementation of the new terms of service. She said that update was intended to do two things: enable a new set of features around business messaging, and “make clarifications and provide greater transparency” around the company’s pre-existing policies.

Niamh Sweeney, WhatsApp’s director of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told the home affairs committee that the exodus was believed to be related to the update to the company’s terms of service. By contrast, Signal wasn’t even in the top 1,000 apps in the UK on 6 January, yet by 9 January it was the most downloaded app in the country.

Data tracked by the analytics firm App Annie shows WhatsApp falling from the eighth most downloaded app in the UK at the beginning of the month to the 23rd by 12 January. In both cases, the increase appears to have come at WhatsApp’s expense. Over the first three weeks of January, Signal has gained 7.5 million users globally, according to figures shared by the UK parliament’s home affairs committee, and Telegram has gained 25 million.

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