WhatsApp alternative is doing well
WhatsApp may soon open up to more other app traffic, but there are still alternatives to the app that are rapidly emerging. For example, Signal seems to be doing extremely well in the Netherlands: there are 1 million Dutch users of this chat app.
It is striking, because there is not a very demonstrable reason why Signal is growing so much: it was even fairly stable and not that exciting in the two years before this increase. It may even have wanted to leave the EU. But now the app has only seen the number of users in our country increase by more than a third in one year, which amounts to 1 million Dutch Signalers. This is evident from the National Social Media Survey from Newcom. At the beginning of 2023, Signal had 785,000 users, but now there are 1,050,000 in our country.
Signal: 1 million Dutch people
It is special, because WhatsApp seems to be really established in our country. Downloading Signal does not mean that WhatsApp is no longer important, but the fact that there are so many users (and these are not downloads, but people who use the app) is special in a country where 17.8 million people live. WhatsApp remained the same as its normal numbers and Teelgram has also grown significantly, by 13 percent. Snapchat is having a more difficult time, because more and more people are ignoring it. Tens of thousands of users have left Snapchat in the past year.
Signal is an alternative to WhatsApp, which claims to ensure that people are not tracked. This refers to large companies such as Meta, which now has an enormous amount of data about its users thanks to all their apps (and power). Signal is created by a non-profit that creates privacy software in an open source manner. It is not looking for profit, but for privacy and security. According to Signal, other apps have to implement “all kinds of tricks and tricks to ultimately monetize your private conversations, often resulting in less privacy and weaker security.”
The social media research may show very different figures next year, because a lot is about to happen with the arrival of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. For example, WhatsApp must allow messages from other apps to be consulted in WhatsApp and vice versa. Then you can use Signal to send chats to someone who uses WhatsApp. This must be done securely and encrypted and that still requires some effort for the companies that must conclude a contract with Meta in order to be used for this. They should hurry, because as gatekeeper Meta must ensure that the rules are adhered to in March this year.
