India is under lockdown, and as a result, office-goers are now working from home. Video conferencing app Zoom has seen an unprecedented surge in its usage, and it has now become the top app under the free section of the Google Play Store, dethroning other popular apps like WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram.
The app has been downloaded over 50 million times on Play Store so far. According to Apptopia, the daily downloads for the app increased from around 1,70,000 in the middle of February to nearly 2.5 million by the end of March. One of the reasons is that the basic version of the Zoom app allows up to 50 participants to join a video conference call. It also allows users to use the virtual background to cover up the messy surroundings.
WhatsApp, which also allows multi-user video conferencing, slipped to the fifth spot despite an increase in its usage. The app is used not only for official meetings but also for educational purposes, like teaching.
Zoom recently hogged a lot of limelight after a report from Motherboard found that its iOS web conferencing app was sharing analytics data with Facebook. It sparked outrage but Zoom quickly updated the app and removed the ‘Login with Facebook’ option. According to the report, the Zoom iOS app was sharing data, like when a user opened the app, their time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores, and disk space.
‘Zoom takes its users’ privacy extremely seriously. We originally implemented the Login with the Facebook feature using the Facebook Software Development Kit, or SDK for iOS, in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform, therefore, we decided to remove the Facebook SDK in our iOS client,’ Founder Eric Yuan clarified in a blog post.
