Gone are the days when one texting app (WhatsApp) ruled and dominated the Indian market. Indian users are picking up and using several texting applications with different purposes in mind and uprooting the market's old trend. According to a report from techARC, users keep multiple texting applications on their smartphones for chatting and sharing stuff. The founder and chief analyst of techARC, Faisal Kawoosa, said that the future of texting apps in India would be pluralistic in India — more details on the story ahead.
WhatsApp Remains the Most Used Texting Application
Kawoosa noted that WhatsApp got the first-mover advantage and has more than 53% users amongst all the major texting applications for over three years. In the same period, Telegram has gained most of its users. While in the last year, Signal gained more than 47% of its users.
The way the users are engaging with several texting applications regularly signifies that there is no primary app for most of them. Most users download and install their texting applications from the stores that come with the operating system (OS).
According to the study, more than 85% of users clearly know why they use each of the texting applications on their device. This further signifies that users don’t use a single application for all the purposes.
Interestingly, after all the noise relating to the WhatsApp privacy and security policies, over 81% of people in the study said they were confident about using WhatsApp as they still found it to be as secure as it was before the policy change.
70% of the users said they would continue using other apps with WhatsApp even if it loses its competitive edge. The reason why a lot of users shifted to Telegram is because of its maximum group capacity feature. Another reason for the shift to Telegram was being able to share large files easily.
