Indians Are Ditching Whatsapp? App Downloads Down By 80% Due To Spying Incident!

Sending a wave of shock all over the country and world was the news of Whatsapp being hacked by an Israeli malware Pegasus.

Whatsapp alerted the people whose accounts were hacked, and that included over a dozen Indian journalists and activists. 

The entire nation was gripped with fear and this has resulted in the popularity of Whatsapp going down in huge amounts, so much so that the rate of downloading of the app has reduced by a massive 80%.

80% is a huge rate of diminished downloading, even for Whatsapp, and this has led to Whatsapp being replaced by other similar apps too.

What are the other apps that are replacing Whatsapp? Find out right here!

Whatsapp Attacked By Pegasus; Downloads Diminish By 80%

Very recently, Whatsapp announced that an Israeli malware, Pegasus had attacked Whatsapp and had been surveilling more than 1,400 users across four continents, and these 1400 included the cream of the crop, such as diplomats, political dissidents, journalists, and senior government officials. 

Following this, Facebook-owned Whatsapp went on to sue the surveillance firm NSO group. 

After Whatsapp gave out the details about Pegasus, the downloads fell to an extremely small amount, 1.8 million. This happened over a period of about a week, from 26 October to 3 November. 

Before that, the downloads were at 8.6 million, which is remarkably high. This number was observed between October 17 and 25. 

Whatsapp Replaced By Other Social Networking Apps; Downloads Increase 

As Whatsapp downloads decrease, the public has diverted to other social networking apps, such as Signal and Telegrams. Signal is just another app like Whatsapp, which provides end-to-end encryption and it saw a huge hike in downloads, from 5,900 to 9600, as much as 63% in the same nine day period in which Whatsapp’s downloads went down. 

On the other hand, another app, Telegram also saw a rise in downloads by 10 percent, from 840,000 to 920,000. 

These figures are as per unique downloads, which are defined as, “one download per Apple ID or Google account, not including re-installs, installs to multiple devices owned by the same account, or app updates.”