The change in WhatsApp ‘s privacy policy continues to make waves and lead to changes in users’ attitudes towards communication apps: Yesterday , Pavel Dorov , founder and CEO of Telegram, announced that the rate of new users joining the app is breaking all records.
According to Dorov, last week the number of users of the app crossed the half-billion mark, as he expected in his announcement three weeks ago in which he announced that the company would start charging money for certain services and displaying advertisements on channels . But the more dramatic detail is the enrollment rate, which he said reached 25 million in the first three days of the current week – that is, 8.3 million users per day, about 5.5 times the average of one and a half million new entrants per day in service in 2020.
“People no longer want to trade in their privacy for free services,” Dorov wrote. “They no longer want to be held hostage by technological monopolies who probably think they can do whatever they please as long as their applications have enough users. We have maintained continuity both in terms of protecting private information and improving our applications. We will not disappoint you.”
A TGspot survey shows that the rise in the rate of users is clearly reflected in the activity on the app page in the Google Play Store. Data from Sensor Tower, which analyzes the market for apps and various stores, shows that since the announcement of the change in WhatsApp’s privacy policy a week ago, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of new reviews on the Telegram page – from an average of a few hundred to several thousand a day.
Telegram, as is well known, is not the only one benefiting from the public outrage over WhatsApp: As we reported earlier this week , Signal, which is backed by one of the founders of WhatsApp, has soared to the top of popular app charts all over the world. Here, too, you can see the rise in popularity in Sensor Tower data, which shows an average number of reviews of less than 100 per day per app in a Google store until a week ago, and has since climbed to an average of 6,000 or more.
At the same time, the number of WhatsApp reviews in the Google store has jumped – but these are mostly negative reviews, when until a week ago there were a little more than 1,000 daily, last Friday the number of negative reviews was equal to the positive ones, and this week the number is around 20,000 Negative reviews of the app every day.
