WhatsApp, arguably the world’s largest instant messaging platform, will not see any threat from its rivals Telegram or Signal. A few months back, when controversies related to the privacy policy of the application surfaced in the market, Elon Musk, a big social influencer these days, tweeted and asked people to move to Signal. Signal is one of the most privacy-enhanced applications for texting in the world. At the same time, Telegram should be just behind Signal in privacy and WhatsApp will take the last place because of its recent policies and drive to store user information and sharing it with third-party companies for making additional revenues. But there’s no way either of these privacy-enhanced applications is going to beat WhatsApp. Here’s why.
Telegram Registered 1 Billionth Download, But Still Not a Threat to WhatsApp
Telegram recently became one of the select applications in the world to get its billionth download. The application deserves it because of its modern texting features. But at the same time, WhatsApp has more than 6 billion downloads. Being a new app, Signal is nowhere close to these two applications. The reason why WhatsApp won’t be overtaken by either of these applications is the brand it has created for itself. It was one of the earliest chatting applications in the world, which got very famous very fast, and since Facebook has acquired it, the app has been rolling out new features every few weeks. Further, the fact that many people didn’t shift to other applications despite WhatsApp claiming that it will take their data and share it with others is just a testament to the fact that people are ‘used’ to the app’s interface and features, and they wouldn’t want to shift to any other application any time soon. But there’s also one more thing to consider here. While people can use Telegram and Signal, they can also use WhatsApp. Shifting to either of these applications doesn’t require the users to leave the other one. Thus, WhatsApp for many users can be for different kinds of conversations and Telegram/Signal can be installed for a different purpose. At the end of the day, it would require a miracle for either Signal or Telegram to beat WhatsApp at the current rate at which it is growing.
