Telegram led the most downloaded non-gaming apps table with more than 63 million installs in January, representing more than four times what it recorded in 2020.
New data released by Sensor Tower a provider of market intelligence and analytics for the mobile app economy, showed that Telegram beat competition from TikTok, Signal, Facebook, and WhatsApp to clinch the crown.
Telegram saw the most growth from India at 24 percent, followed by Indonesia at 10 percent. India is WhatsApp’s largest market contributing more than 340 million users to the Facebook-owned messaging platform.
Although there may be other factors like updated features that have contributed to Telegram’s rise in the mobile apps world, WhatsApp’s so-called misstep on January 4, is considered the major factor.
The world’s largest messaging platform, WhatsApp had said it was releasing a new set of terms and conditions that will involve sharing users’ data with Facebook companies. Users were given until February to make up their minds to accept the new privacy policy. The deadline was however extended to May after a backlash that saw many users pledging anew allegiance with competitors such as Signal and Telegram.
The most uproar had come from its largest market, India where the government had in very unequivocal terms asked WhatsApp to withdraw the proposed update. According to Indian authorities, citizens of the country should be respected given that it is home to the largest user base for WhatsApp. The ministry also said that the new terms of service and privacy policy are a cause of grave concern regarding the implications for choice as well as the autonomy of the users in India.
A study by CyberMedia Research (CMR) found that 79 percent of users across India’s top eight cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Pune are reconsidering using WhatsApp with 28 percent of those even planning to leave the platform after the implementation of its privacy policy.
WhatsApp had topped the Sensor Tower report in the past but as of January it is not only yielding ground to Telegram, Signal also beats it to the third position.
Here is how Telegram and Signal compare to WhatsApp and why many users may be dumping the latter for good:
Security
Like WhatsApp recently found out, security is the most important feature users can ask for.
Social media security breaches have the potential to cause up to $6 billion in cybercrime damages by 2021, according to a report by Thycotic and Cybersecurity Ventures. The report found that over 3 billion user credentials and passwords were stolen in 2016, which meant that criminals hacked and stole 8.2 million passwords per day, or approximately 95 passwords stolen every second.
For many experts, WhatsApp really had it together until it tangled with Facebook. Currently, WhatsApp collects about 16 data points from the latest updates it has to share with Facebook companies.
Telegram and Signal do not share data with a third party and do not collect as much as 16 data points like WhatsApp.
Telegram collects only 3 data points, Signal makes use of linked data and only stores your phone number.
WhatsApp and Signal make use of the same encryption protocol. The difference is that Signal’s encryption is open source, meaning it can be examined for vulnerabilities by security researchers. WhatsApp, on the other hand, uses its own proprietary deployment and it is not open source.
The three platforms support self disappearing messages.
Some experts say Telegram can technically access a user’s message given that the MTProto, the encryption protocol used by Telegram is – like WhatsApp – proprietary and only partly open-source.
Sunday Alawode, a software programmer, told BusinessDay he uses Signal to chat with fellow programmers and foreign clients because of the high security. Signal allows you to relay voice calls to its servers so your identity remains concealed from your contacts. The feature is somewhat similar to what a VPN does.
Groups
WhatsApp groups have a capacity of 256 users.
Telegram, however, brings support for groups with up to 200,000 members. The interesting part of Telegram group chats is the multiple group-specific features like bots, polls, quizzes, hashtags, among others that make users’ experience in groups a lot more fun. The large group capacity also means it is possible to get lost in the conversation.
Creating groups on Signal is a lot different from WhatsApp and Telegram. While you can broadcast messages to multiple contacts at once in a group, you don’t have the option to do this on Signal. But to compensate, Signal recently added a feature that allows group video calls. WhatsApp’s video calls allow 8 users per time.
Users can also export their group chats from WhatsApp to Signal using a feature on the settings. You can migrate as many group chats as you want.
“I successfully migrated four group chats from WhatsApp to Signal (including my family),” said a new user, @anazhqan on Twitter.
File sharing
On WhatsApp, photos, videos, and audio files can be shared up to 16MB. It also allows you to share all sorts of files and documents up to 100MB.
The size limit for sharing files on Telegram is 1.5GB.
You can send files of all kinds on Signal securely. Signal by default also encrypts all the local files with a 4-digit passphrase.
