Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014, just after Facebook announced its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp; the figures on Threema’s staff and App Store ranking, WhatsApp’s German users and Zuckerberg’s user target are all from that week.
The startup Threema did not expect that in the space of 24 hours it would double its user base, after news broke of Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp. According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Threema is currently the most downloaded app on the App Store in Germany.
Threema has just three employees. Its service is the same as WhatsApp’s, with one key difference: full encryption, so that not even the app’s own creators can read users’ messages.
WhatsApp promises a high level of security, although it had some problems in this area in its early days. After Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition, Germans are far from convinced that their privacy will be safe in Facebook’s hands, because they think that if Facebook sees everything, WhatsApp will see everything.
Angela Merkel’s own phone was monitored for years by US intelligence agencies, agencies that have shown they get on very well with Facebook, among other tech giants.
According to TechCrunch, WhatsApp has 30 million users in Germany, and a large share of them are quite determined to abandon ship and choose an alternative that is not owned by Facebook.
In Spain, too, many users seem ready to stop using WhatsApp and switch to services such as Line, Telegram or other alternatives.
Even so, Mark Zuckerberg plans to reach 1 billion WhatsApp users within a few years, so it will be interesting to see how the balance between users joining and leaving the service evolves.
Featured image: Tim Reckmann, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
