India tops Zoom downloads in April

BENGALURU: India was the biggest market for Zoom in terms of the number of mobile application downloads in April despite the security issues and government warnings. Zoom was the most downloaded non-game app worldwide for April 2020 with close to 131 million installs, a 60x growth from April 2019, according to Sensor Tower.

The countries with the most installs of the app during this period were India at 18%, followed by US at 14%. The development comes at a time when the home ministry’s cyber coordination centre on April 16 said “Zoom is a not a safe platform”, advising government employees not to use it because of security concerns and privacy lapses.

The US-based Zoom, which is also being used to conduct school classes besides corporate meetings, has also been tightening its encryption as it has come under fire globally for privacy issues. On Thursday it acquired end-to-end encryption startup Keybase to beef up its capabilities.


Players like Facebook, which also owns WhatsApp, besides Google and Microsoft have also started pushing their video calling products and have increased the limit of the number of people on a call, which has been one of the major advantages for Zoom till now.

“For India specifically, we don’t have a privacy law yet. If Zoom is being downloaded here and there are problems with the usage of the app (privacy implications), there is very little you can do right now, considering it’s a private platform and there is no law as such that regulates how data provided to this platform can be used,” said Smitha Krishna Prasad, director, Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi.

The country’s coronavirus tracking application Aarogya Setu also made it to the global top 10 at 7, as the government said earlier this week that it has hit 90 million downloads.