Nope, Signal and Telegram won’t take over WhatsApp in Africa. With all the privacy concerns people have nowadays, and with Twitter CEO + Elon Musk adding fuel to the flame of deleting WhatsApp… I still believe WhatsApp will not be going anywhere anytime soon at least in Africa.
This is mainly because of the following:
Low Tier Smartphones built for Africa like Tecno and Infinix all have Whatsapp preinstalled by default, and WhatsApp gets the first-class treatment, for example, it’s background systems don’t get turned off and guess what?? You cant even uninstall it! This makes up for Whatsapp to dominate since these Low Tier Smartphones are leading in sales here.
Secondly, the problem in privacy and security lies in Android’s fragmented system. We have people with Android 6.0 having Whatsapp which is dangerous because even if Whatsapp is secure..its underlying OS is outdated… So not even signal and telegram can handle that problem in Africa on their own. Privacy is expensive.
Third, we don’t really care about privacy. There I said it. Sue me. We don’t, unless you are spreading our secrets to our friends, lock us up because of political views….we are good. So just take out data and advertise it back to us…We won’t buy what you sell anyways. What I mean here is…the benefit we get from Facebook product outweigh its “obvious problems”
Lastly, WhatsApp and Facebook products are free of charge no need to pay for data in many countries in Africa. So unless Signal and Telegram match that..WhatsApp will not go anywhere anytime soon.
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