Coronavirus effect: Zoom dethrones WhatsApp and TikTok to become the number one app on the Google Play Store

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the nationwide lockdown in India, people are working from home. When working from home, they are resorting to video conferencing apps to stay in touch with friends, family, and co-workers as well. One such app which has gained popularity is Zoom. To tell you the kind of popularity the service has gained, on the Google Play store it has been downloaded more than 100,000,000 times. To put things into perspective, on the Google Play Store, TikTok has been downloaded more than 500,000,000 times and WhatsApp has been downloaded more than 5,000,000,000 times.

Coming back to Zoom, it is a video conferencing app with the ability to have 100 people in a meeting. Since the app is used by business and consumers alike and is easy to use to set up conferences, it has become the go-to solution.

However, not everything was a bed of roses for the service. Turns out, the app was sending personal information back to Facebook, albeit unwittingly. After a massive uproar, Zoom has removed the offending code. The issue started with Zoom using Facebook Login. The company said that they wanted to make it easy for users to log into the app, hence the Facebook login. The login feature is implemented using the Facebook SDK, which connects the users of the app to Facebook’s Graph API. Once users log in, the SDK can then share information with third parties, and it is this behaviour that has caused concern amongst users. Additionally, Zoom’s terms of service made no explicit mention that by using Facebook Login, people were consenting to their private information being shared with the social media giant. You can read more about it here.

Zoom has cemented itself as an antifragile service. According to Wikipedia, “Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.” When there are times of distress or the market is facing some sort of problems or shortage, business or service will rise to fill the void. These services and businesses that thrive during an overall market downturn are called Antifragile. It is an interesting concept. In the trying times of the Coronavirus, we have seen a rise in demand for internet at home, OTT platforms, home delivery services, medical services, online gaming and more.