Telegram and Signal Will Never Match the Ubiquity of WhatsApp
The Facebook-owned messaging app has built an enormous social infrastructure over the past decade. Rivals hoping to replace it hardly stand a chance.
When one won’t do.
Photographer: Damien Meyer/AFP
The messaging app Telegram recently joined an exclusive club: It had its one billionth download, becoming one of about a dozen apps in the world to hit the milestone. Too bad that when it comes to mobile messaging, one name still rules them all.
Facebook Inc.-owned WhatsApp, the world’s biggest mobile messenger, has been downloaded onto more than six billion devices, according to Sensor Tower, an app intelligence firm that also tracked Telegram’s numbers, which now look piddling in comparison. Apptopia, another app research firm, estimates that more than half a billion people on Earth use WhatsApp everyday. The corresponding figure is about 36 million for Telegram. After eight years of competing with WhatsApp, Telegram looks unlikely to ever catch up in terms of scale.