On account of issues of privacy, there has been a steady drift of the users from WhatsApp to other messengers, especially Signal. In fact, WhatsApp has been co-founded by Brian Acton, but it was sold to WhatsApp for a huge price of $16 billion in 2014. Brian continued with WhatsApp till 2017 after which he left. In 2018, he co-founded Signal Foundation which hosts a messaging platform under the same name. There is a surge in the downloads of Signal by both the Android and Apple users. It is leading in 60 countries in free app chats. India has witnessed a large number of downloads recently. Brian feels WhatsApp should have a clear privacy policy. Signal is very simple in terms of service and privacy policy. Technically they focus on managing the servers so that there is no outrage due to increased number of users. They keep on releasing new features.

Currently, Signal has a lean team of 50 people. They have talented engineers. Though they are a non-profit organisation, they have to defray their salary bills and meet the overheads. They have a business plan for funding through donations and grants.

WhatsApp has over 400 million users in India. Signal has just over 30 million users across the world.

Signal is an open source app, and is open to researchers who can verify whether the encryption works right and suggest ways to fix the flaws. It makes the app more robust and secure.

As such, Signal and WhatsApp are clones. The only data that Signal collects is the user’s phone number. Even it may not be required by building encrypted services. All other information, including individual’s profile, picture and messages are encrypted.

There is no business application in Signal, which WhatsApp has. In Signal, there are problem areas — no provision to store chats and other data in the cloud. Signal has no feature such as WhatsApp Pay.