Signal, the secure messaging app, was in the news last week after a journalist disclosed he was accidentally in a group chat with government and military leaders. This insight has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with the impact on demand for Signal.
The news broke last Monday and ever since downloads have been on the rise.
On an average day, Signal gets 95K downloads, according to Appfigures Intelligence. On the 24th, the evening the news broke, downloads rose 26%. By Tuesday, downloads spiked to 193K and on Wednesday, downloads hit an almost all-time high with 195K, according to our estimates.
I dug into the data a bit more and noticed downloads from Yemen, the focus of the chat in question, rose nearly 5x - but the numbers are fairly small. The peak, in Yemen, reached about 1K downloads on Wednesday and has been dropping since.
The thing is, Signal really had nothing to do with any of this. The journalist didn't hack the app to get into the group chat, the encryption wasn't broken, and the service wasn't doing anything it wasn't supposed to.
The news wasn't great or relevant to the app yet, it resulted in Signal getting 350K more downloads than what was expected. That's a positive. If you're developer it's important to be ready for when your app is mentioned in the news. Hopefully not for something like this, but "no publicity is bad publicity".
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