Arab News Japan

TOKYO: Established social media platforms are facing fierce competition in Asia, according to a report in Japan’s Nikkei newspaper. Between January 6 and 10, Nikkei reported that upcoming private messaging app Signal saw 7.5 million downloads.

Signal has been boosted by endorsements from the likes of Elon Musk and Edward Snowden.

Users are switching from platforms such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp after the company altered its terms and conditions of service, allowing it to access contact lists, location, financial information and usage data, the report said. 

Another messaging app, Telegram, saw more than 25 million new users around the world between Jan. 10 and Jan. 12 and now has more than half a billion users. WhatsApp has around 2 billion, but has been around much longer.

 WhatsApp says that it cannot and does not access private conversations as they are encrypted.

The move to use new social media platforms has arisen from growing concerns regarding privacy and security, particularly in China and Hong Kong. Only Europe hasn’t signed up to WhatsApp’s new terms of service.

 WhatsApp’s biggest single market is India, with 400 million users, but analysts see those users adding other services such as Signal rather than replacing WhatsApp, according to the report.

 “WhatsApp has committed itself to India in a very big way and essentially established the ecosystem of content players, of commerce players around it which allows it to thrive in the country,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst, founder and CEO of Greyhound Research, told Nikkei Asia. “Purely from that perspective, neither Signal nor Telegram has made any visible commitment to the country at all.”

According to the Nikkei report, WhatsApp is commonly used by businesses in Asia to communicate with customers with many having chatbots tailored to the app. The company launched WhatsApp Business in early 2018 and has entered the payments realm in its two largest markets, including India (the other is Brazil).

In a report published in February last year, data analysis platform DataReportal said 81 percent of surveyed internet users aged 16 to 64 in Singapore used WhatsApp.

 But its popularity is limited in other countries. China’s WeChat has 1.2 billion users, while LINE has 86 million users in Japan. South Korea’s Kakao Talk has 220 million users and is available in 15 different languages.