Telegram Geeks

2021-01-08 21:35:01 I hear Facebook has an entire department devoted to figuring out why Telegram is so popular. Imagine dozens of employees working on just that full-time.

I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect your users.

Millions of people are outraged by the latest change in WhatsApp Terms, which now say users must feed all their private data to Facebook’s ad engine. It’s no surprise that the flight of users from WhatsApp to Telegram, already ongoing for a few years, has accelerated.

At about 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation. Unable to compete with Telegram in quality and privacy, Facebook’s WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bots adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article [1].

We have also detected bots which spread inaccurate information about Telegram on social media. Here are the 3 myths they are pushing:

Myth 1. “Telegram’s code is not open-source”. In reality, all Telegram client apps have been open source since 2013 [2]. Our encryption and API are fully documented and have been reviewed by security experts thousands of times. Moreover, Telegram is the only messaging app in the world that has verifiable builds both for iOS and Android [3]. As for WhatsApp, they intentionally obfuscate their code, making it impossible to verify their encryption and privacy.

Myth 2. “Telegram is Russian”. In fact, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020 [4]. Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries such as Iran, while WhatsApp and other “supposedly secure” apps have never had any issue in these places.

Myth 3. “Telegram is not encrypted”. Every chat on Telegram has been encrypted since launch. We have Secret Chats that are end-to-end and Cloud Chats that also offer real-time secure and distributed cloud storage [5]. WhatsApp, on the other hand, had zero encryption for a few years, and then adopted an encryption protocol funded by the US Government [6]. Even if we assume that the WhatsApp encryption is solid, it’s invalidated via multiple backdoors and reliance on backups [7].

In 2019 alone, Facebook spent almost 10 billion dollars on marketing [8] (I guess this includes paid bots on Wikipedia and other sites).

Unlike Facebook, Telegram doesn't spend any money, let alone billions of dollars, on marketing. We believe that people are smart enough to choose what is best for them. And, judging by the half a billion people using Telegram, this belief is justified.

[1] – WhatsApp Gives Users Ultimatum – Share Data with Facebook or Lose Access
[2] – In December 2020, the Wikipedia article about WhatsApp had the label “This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use”. Related investigation is discussed here.
[3] – Telegram Source Code
[4] – Reproducible Builds for Telegram Apps
[4] – On Digital Resistance in Russia
[5] – On Telegram Encryption
[6] – U.S. Government Funded The WhatsApp Encryption
[7] – Why WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure
[8] – Facebook Marketing Spending from 2010 to 2019 Open / Comment

2020-12-23 13:44:59 The end of the year is normally a time to look back at the past 12 months. Instead, our founder Pavel Durov has just announced his strategy for making Telegram sustainable, to continue providing you with great features for decades to come. Open / Comment

2020-12-23 13:44:59 Today's update adds Voice Chats, creating a seamless integration of text and talk in groups. Members can join and leave these open conference calls at any time for a bit of spontaneous conversation alongside their usual text messages and media.

As the calendar turns over to 2021, we'll be busy taking in your feedback and improving Voice Chats with features like video and screen sharing at the top of our list.

To read about all the features in this update, like SD Card Storage for Android and more, check out the full post on our blog:
https://telegram.org/blog/voice-chats Open / Comment

2020-11-04 17:34:12 Introducing Bot API 5.0

• Support for the football and slot machine animated emoji.
• Run your own Bot API server.
• Transfer Bot ownership to another account.
• New options for Webhooks.
• New method copyMessage to send a copy of any mesage.
• Support for Live Locations, including the latest changes.
• Support for Multiple Pinned Messages
• Support for File Albums
• Support for Anonymous Admins.
• Support for and animated emoji.
• And much more, read the full changelog here:

https://core.telegram.org/bots/api-changelog#November-4-2020 Open / Comment

2020-10-30 16:48:35 https://telegram.org/blog/pinned-messages-locations-playlists Open / Comment

2020-10-08 15:45:50 Apple is requesting that we shut down 3 channels used by the people of Belarus to expose the identities of their oppressors.

@karatelibelarusi
@chatpartizan
@belarusassholes

Their concern is that publishing the personal information of law enforcers and propagandists may incite violence.

I think this situation is not black and white and would rather leave the channels be, but typically Apple doesn’t offer much choice for apps like Telegram in such situations. Unfortunately, I assume these channels will end up getting blocked on iOS, but remain available on other platforms.

P. S. Everyone is welcome to express their views and comment on this post provided they stay on-topic and use English. Thanks! Open / Comment

2020-10-05 00:01:17 Some users asked whether comments will become the default mode for channels. While we think it’s fun to comment on channels, most channels don’t need commenting, so it will remain optional and disabled by default.

That said, native comments are a great upgrade for channels that had been previously relying on the web comments bot. Native comments are faster, more feature-rich for posting and moderating, and have built-in reply notifications.

Some users rightly pointed out that Telegram native comments look like chats rather than the two-level comments you can find on social networks. That’s exactly the point - Telegram is not a social network, but a messaging app.

While many people successfully use Telegram to distribute information among millions of users (posts broadcasted by channels generate over 350 billion views monthly), Telegram will remain an easy-to-use minimalist tool, with chats at the center of the user experience. Open / Comment

2020-09-30 21:16:40 https://telegram.org/blog/filters-anonymous-admins-comments Open / Comment

2020-08-14 21:18:50 https://telegram.org/blog/video-calls Open / Comment