Telegram & Signal may never match Whatsapp’s ubiquity
The messaging app Telegram recently joined an exclusive club: It had its one billionth download, becoming one of about a dozen apps in the world to hit the milestone. Too bad that when it comes to mobile messaging, one name still rules them all.
Facebook -owned Whatsapp, the world’s biggest mobile messenger, has been downloaded onto more than six billion devices, according to Sensor Tower, an app intelligence firm that also tracked Telegram’s numbers, which now look piddling in comparison. Apptopia, another app research firm, estimates that more than half a billion people on Earth use Whatsapp everyday. The corresponding figure is about 36 million for Telegram. After eight years of competing with Whatsapp, Telegram looks unlikely to ever catch up in terms of scale.
In the battle for our attention, Facebook faces an array of credible, growing threats, not least from Tiktok. But the company should feel much more secure in messaging thanks to Whatsapp — a smartphone staple so deeply entrenched in daily life that it has become a communication utility for the globe.
It was harder to see this last January, when Whatsapp controversially updated its privacy settings and prompted millions of people to flock to rivals. Elon Musk told his 42 million Twitter followers to use the encrypted messaging service Signal. Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, said that same month that the flight of Whatsapp users to his app was accelerating. “We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history,” he told his channel subscribers, adding that the presidents of Brazil and Turkey were among the new crop of users.
But this spectacle wasn’t enough to truly threaten Facebook. That’s because unlike a typical battle between consumer brands like Pepsi and Coca-cola, Whatsapp’s growth is not just driven by consumer tastes. It’s fueled by the social infrastructure that billions of people have created over more than a decade. Barring any drastic regulatory action, Telegram and Signal will probably find it impossible to supplant Whatsapp.
Whatsapp’s co-founder Jan Koum was as early as you could be in the world of mobile messaging, partly due to a fluke of timing. He started building Whatsapp in 2009 from his home in Santa Clara, Calif., initially designing it as a simple service for displaying a friend’s status next to their name, like “At the gym,” or “Battery is low.” That all changed when Apple launched push notifications that year, allowing developers to ping people when they weren’t using an app.
When Koum’s early users noticed that their statuses were pinging everybody each time they were updated, they started using the new app to ping people with more jokey statuses, like “I woke up late.” Koum watched the statuses change to things like “Hey, how are you?” and realized he had inadvertently created a messaging service.