Butting Heads With WhatsApp And Zoom: Signal Trying To Kill Two Birds With One Stone?

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According to the Kaspersky Global Privacy Report 2020, where they surveyed 15,002 consumers across 23 countries, one-in-five respondents reported to being concerned about the user data collected by apps on their mobile devices.

This shows that people, as of late, have started to become wary of how various social media and instant messaging platforms have been collecting their data. Thus the need for ‘privacy-focused’ features has started seeing a small uptick.

Now, cash in on the same trend, Signal which is a cross-platform encrypted messaging service is stepping up its game to butt heads with the likes of Zoom and WhatsApp!

Signal is a privacy-first messaging platform. It happens to be open source and by default uses end-to-end encryption. Additionally, neither does it store of any metadata of messages nor does it implement the cloud for backing up messages. 

Privacy activist and infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the European Union, and even the co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Acton himself have endorsed the instant messaging platform Signal.

That being said, Signal has more to offer than simply being privacy-centric. They know very well that consumers will need more to rally being their application. 

Though somewhat flawed in terms of privacy, the current heavyweight in this space WhatsApp offers robust features which can seldom be matched. This is why Signal, to step up its game, has placed its next big bet on desktop calls.

Their recently released beta features one-to-one voice and video call support and has been reported to work on macOS, Windows, and Linux as well.

Killing Two Birds With One Stone?

Signal offering privacy centred messaging platform while also focussing on desktop suggests that they are definitely trying to kill two birds – WhatsApp and Zoom – with one stone.

However, while it could be an uphill battle for Signal to compete with the Facebook-owned WhatsApp which currently has 2 billion users worldwide, they could certainly take on Zoom very easily as the latter has repeatedly failed in providing a secure platform for the purpose of video calling.

The emergence of remote work and relying on digital platforms has busted the video conferencing space wide open for more competitors, such as Google Meet, to come in. Thus this is somewhere Signal can certainly gain a lot of traction.

Earlier this month in a blog post, the company, while asking feedback from its consumers, wrote – calls need to ‘zoom’ out of the past (definitely pun intended) and into the future. Mobile users who may have wanted a seamless experience on cross platforms can be wooed heavily by Signal’s secure desktop calling application.

Apart from that, Signal has another feature that will could also be a valued addition. Their platform enables a user to receive messages from other users outside their devices’ contact list.

These messages are dubbed as message requests and could definitely further help Signal to increase their entire value proposition to the consumers. 

Now it remains to be seen what does the future hold for their growth when the platform comes out of beta. We will keep you updated on all future developments. Until then, stay tuned.

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