Telegram founder Pavel Dorov announced today (Tuesday) in a tweet he posted on his Twitter account that the app had crossed the 500 million active user threshold during the first week of January. He wrote: “In the first week of January, Telegram rose to 500 million active users each month. Since then, it has continued to grow by 25 million new users in the last 72 hours.” The rest of Facebook’s platforms starting February 8th.
In a post he wrote on his telegram channel, he sent a slight and implicit sting towards WhatsApp: “People no longer want to give up their privacy in support of a free service. People do not want to be held hostage by technological monopolies that seem to think they can escape anything because their apps have A critical mass of participants. “
Meanwhile, according to US publications, between January 6 and 10, about 7.5 million downloads of the “Signal” app were registered from the various app stores. This is a 43-fold increase over the previous week, and these days are actually the download records of the app. The highest number of new users for the two was recorded in India, with 2.3 million Indians downloading the signal – a 30 per cent increase in downloads, and another 1.5 million downloading Telegram – a 16 per cent increase in messages.
As you may recall, the storm began last week, when WhatsApp users around the world began receiving alerts in recent hours about updates to the terms of use, and the app’s privacy policy. The update included a WhatsApp announcement that next month it will begin sharing information with other platforms owned by parent company Facebook. This update will take effect on February 8, and users who do not accept these terms will not be able to use the app.