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Icon of the WhatsApp app on a smartphone: Hardly any messenger is as popular
Photo: xim.gs / imago / xim.gs
There is movement in the market for messenger apps for smartphones.
Since the Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp announced a revision of its terms of use and its privacy policy, its competitors have grown above average.
The Swiss messenger Threema announced that the daily download numbers had "multiplied" since last Friday.
"In the app stores in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Threema is number 1 in the app charts for payment apps," said a spokesman.
There were similar reports from Telegram and Signal.
Telegram boss Pawel Durow said on his platform on Wednesday that in the first week of January Telegram exceeded the mark of 500 million monthly active users.
“After that, we continued to grow: in the last 72 hours alone, Telegram added 25 million new users.
These new users came from all over the world - 38 percent from Asia, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Latin America and eight percent from the Middle East and Africa. "This is a significant increase compared to last year, when 1, 5 million new users signed up.
The privacy-friendly WhatsApp competitor Signal also benefited from a recommendation by Elon Musk.
The Tesla boss wrote "Use Signal" on Twitter last Thursday.
After that, Signals servers repeatedly failed to register new customers under the onslaught.
WhatsApp is the world's most successful messenger service with more than two billion users, followed by Facebook Messenger (1.3 billion users) and the Chinese service WeChat (1.1 billion users).
WhatsApp's new privacy policy has been the subject of controversy since it was announced because it also deals with how WhatsApp shares data with other Facebook companies.
However, fundamental changes only apply to users outside the »European Region«, i.e. also outside Germany.
A WhatsApp company spokesman told SPIEGEL that there were "no changes to the data transfer practices of WhatsApp in the European region (including Great Britain) resulting from the updated terms of use and the privacy policy."
Icon: The mirror
mak / dpa