Opinion | WhatsApp-phobia

For a messaging application that’s accustomed to seeing almost a million downloads a day in India, 200,000 daily installations is quite a fall. Reports suggest that chat platform WhatsApp experienced a precipitous 80% decline in downloads between 26 October and 3 November, over the previous nine-day period. It was on 29 October that Whatsapp announced that it had sued Israel’s NSO Group, whose eavesdropping software Pegasus exploited the application’s video calling feature to hack into users’ devices. It was after this revelation that new users apparently began shunning WhatsApp. This is understandable, as people have legitimate concerns about privacy and any breach is bound to shake their confidence.

Interestingly, WhatsApp’s rival Signal recorded major gains in India, though on a much smaller base, as did Telegram, which also saw a sudden spurt in downloads over the period under study.