“And a lot of that insanity, to us, is the result of bad business models that produce bad technology. “We’re organized as a nonprofit because we feel like the way the internet currently works is insane,” CEO Moxie Marlinspike told me. And while Signal still has a small fraction of the market for mobile messaging - Telegram, another upstart messenger, says it added 90 million active users in January alone - the rapid growth has been a cause for excitement inside the small distributed team that makes the app.Īdding millions of users has served as a vindication for a company that has sought to build a healthier internet by adopting different incentives than most Silicon Valley companies. While the company won’t confirm the size of its user base, a second employee told me the app has now surpassed 40 million users globally.

1 in the app stores of 70 countries, and it continues to rank near the top of most of them, including the United States. “The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful.” But in a 12-hour period the Sunday after WhatsApp’s privacy policy update began, Signal added another 2 million users, an employee familiar with the matter told me.

Last month, according to one research firm, the six-year-old app had about 20 million users worldwide. Among the biggest beneficiaries has been Signal, the encrypted messaging app whose development is funded by a nonprofit organization. In the meantime, though, tens of millions of users began seeking alternatives to Facebook’s suite of products. The resulting furor sparked a backlash that led Facebook-owned WhatsApp to delay the policy from taking effect until May. The changes were designed to enable businesses to send and store messages to WhatsApp’s 2 billion-plus users, but they came with an ultimatum: agree by February 8th, or you can no longer use the app. On January 6th, WhatsApp users around the world began seeing a pop-up message notifying them of upcoming changes to the service’s privacy policy.

Inner turmoil