Several Indians have begun utilizing option immediate messaging apps rather of WhatsApp, more than issues of privacy ever given that WhatsApp disclosed its policy to share information with its parent business Facebook.
Private messaging apps Signal and Telegram have registered a spike in downloads. According to app analytics firm Sensor Tower, amongst January 5 and 10 alone, Signal had 2.3 million downloads even though Telegram saw 1.5 million new downloads through the very same period.
Both the apps have risen in rankings primarily based on app downloads. Signal has gained important ground in India. The app that was ranked outdoors the prime 1,000 on January 4 as per App Annie, rose to rank six by January 10. During the very same period, Telegram which was at 21 climbed to 15.
In comparison, WhatsApp, which has a user base of about 400 million in India, saw a steep decline. Downloads for the app fell by 35% to 1.3 million from 5.2 million. WhatsApp’s rank in the general prime apps list fell from quantity eight on January 4 to rank 23 by January 10.
Telegram announced that the app has crossed 500 million active customers by adding 25 million new customers amongst January 9 and 12. The app’s founder Pavel Durov in a weblog mentioned that 38% of the new customers came from Asia. Durov mentioned he stands by his guarantee of ‘not doing deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies’. Similarly, on January 10, the Signal official account tweeted, “There will never be ads in Signal, because your data belongs in your hands, not ours”.
Seeing the higher downloads from India, Signal mentioned it will be introducing characteristics like chat wallpapers, animated stickers and an about field in user profiles. It has also improved the group get in touch with limit from 5 customers to eight.
Both Signal and Telegram presently claim to run on donations from customers. Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder and CEO, Greyhound Research, points out that as these apps add more customers and introduce characteristics such as higher-high-quality video calling, audio calls with quite a few individuals, onboarding APIs, and bots and so forth, there will be a need to have to invest drastically behind infrastructure.
In a December 2020 weblog post, Durov estimated that Telegram ‘needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going’.
Because these apps are far behind WhatsApp in their lifecycle, their journey to monetisation will be slow. “They may introduce premium features for paying users as part of their move towards a gradual monetisation,” says Prabhu Ram, head — market intelligence group, CMR. Telegram plans to bring in particular characteristics for enterprises and an ad platform for public one particular-to-quite a few channels.
What is unclear is if the existing public conversation about privacy will have a lasting impact on WhatsApp’s user base. In India, the app added benefits from the ‘network effect’ — it is important since of the quantity of individuals who use it. Gogia says that customers who are downloading other apps are just testing these apps out for now, and not exiting WhatsApp entirely however.
Because individuals are generating profiles on a number of apps, “as we move forward, we may see that the era of monolithic social messaging platforms is potentially over, and various apps need to co-exist,” says Ram.
Brands have been deploying chatbots on WhatsApp to communicate with buyers, sending them updates on purchases, reminders for payments, and so forth. “If brands notice that a significant chunk of users is moving away from WhatsApp to other platforms, they may deploy chatbots on these platforms too,” says Gautam Mehra, chief information and solution officer, dentsu Asia Pacific and CEO – dentsu Programmatic, South Asia.
But ahead of brands can begin deploying their chatbots on option apps, “the apps themselves need to show commitment to local markets and ecosystems,” says Gogia.