Fifty billion messages a day, and a million new users daily: WhatsApp is currently the world’s most successful messaging service. Smartphone users send texts, images, videos and voicemails via apps like this. Young users in particular increasingly prefer them to writing text messages and communicationg via Facebook.

Fast, affordable and convienient: Messaging services are enjoying incredible popularity worldwide. In Europe, WhatsApp is especially successful, whereas WeChat from China, KakaoTalk from Korea and Line from Japan are widespread in Asian regions. Despite the popularity of such apps, a debate has sprung up about data security on these services. Experts have been criticizing the inadequate encryption on many services, including WhatsApp. After it was sold to Facebook, user numbers for other messaging services rose. According to current test results, Russian app Telegram and Swiss app Threema are considered the safest alternatives.