Call it schadenfreude, but a small Swiss messaging app has seen its users in Germany double in the days after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was buying its competitor WhatsApp for $19 billion.
The app by Threema is now at the top of the paid-app chart in Germany, TechCrunch reported.
While Zuckerberg said he would not change the model of WhatsApp — a $1-per-year fee with no advertising — the Germans seem to be voting with their feet.
Threema’s website says its app is true end-to-end encryption and goes on to state, “Unlike other popular messaging apps (including those claiming to use encryption), even we as the server operator have absolutely no way to read your messages.”
Perhaps the Germans are a little untrusting of US companies after Chancellor Angela Merkel learned the National Security Agency was listening in on her conversations. In any event, 200,000 new Threema users have signed up to pay $1.99, with 80 percent of those new sign-ups living in Germany.