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![Boost for the Swiss messenger service Threema - thanks to Whatsapp.]()
Keystone
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Boost for the Swiss messenger service Threema – thanks to Whatsapp.
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![The reason: uncertainty about the new usage rules for Whatsapp.]()
AFP
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The reason: uncertainty about the new usage rules for Whatsapp.
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Keystone
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“We recorded almost five times the daily downloads”, is what Threema has said over the past few weeks.
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![For Facebook founder and Whatsapp owner Mark Zuckerberg, however, data octopuses are a business model.]()
AFP
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7/7
For Facebook founder and Whatsapp owner Mark Zuckerberg, however, data octopuses are a business model.
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Marc Kowalsky («Balance»)
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It was an eventful week for Threema founders Silvan Engeler, Martin Blatter and Manuel Kasper – and a successful one.
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First, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that your messaging and telephony service is not legally to be regarded as a telecommunications service provider and therefore does not have to identify its customers or save data. This would have massively damaged the start-up’s business model of running a messenger service without data collection.
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Second, the deadline expired that competitor WhatsApp gave users to accept the new terms and conditions – which brought Threema masses of new customers. “We recorded almost five times the daily downloads,” says Blatter.
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User boost continues
The company headquarters in Pfäffikon SZ is just about to exceed the limit of ten million users. At the end of 2020 there were eight million. The announcement of the new WhatsApp rules alone brought Threema a million new customers in January.
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“The growth will continue,” says Blatter. Because despite the expiry of the deadline, WhatsApp can still be used as far as possible without agreeing to the new rules – but probably not for much longer.
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Article from the “Handelszeitung”![]()
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This article was published in the “Handelszeitung”. You can find more exciting articles at www.handelszeitung.ch.
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These apps are good alternatives to WhatsappTelegram, Signal and Threema: These are the three challengers to Whatsapp, which belongs to the Facebook group and is currently under criticism. Telegram is the heavyweight in the federal government. The Russian messenger has around half a billion active users, is free, popular with conspiracy theorists in the US and worldwide, but has one major weakness: messages are not encrypted by default, as is the case with Signal or Threema. Telegram only offers so-called end-to-end encryption for “secret chats”, which must be selected separately and are not available for group calls. With Signal and Threema, on the other hand, encryption is standard, but the two messengers are not yet that widespread. Threema, the Swiss app, claims to have over 8 million active users at the end of 2020. Signal, the product from California, is currently gaining a million new users every day and is now likely to be installed on several dozen million devices. Edward Snowden (37) is a fan of the free app. Marc Iseli
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