Telegram (software)
Telegram (also known as Telegram Messenger) is a cloud-based, cross-platform social media and instant messaging (IM) shttps://influencergonewild.xyz/rashid-khan/ervice. It launched for iOS on 14 August 2013 and Android on 20 October 2013. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group
voice or video calls as well as public livestreams. It is available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web browsers. Telegram offers end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls,[and optionally in private chats if both participants use a mobile device.
Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels.
Telegram was founded in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov.Its servers are distributed worldwide with several data centers, while the headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021,with 1 billion downloads globally as of late
August 2021. As of 2024, registration to Telegram requires either a phone number and a smartphone or one of a limited number of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) issued in December 2022.
As of March 2025, Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users,with India as the country with the most users.
History
Development
Telegram was launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Previously, the pair founded the Russian social network VK, which they left in 2014, saying it had been taken over by the government.Pavel sold his remaining stake in VK and left Russia after resisting government pressure.[Nikolai created the MTProto protocol that is the
basis for the messenger, while Pavel provided financial support and infrastructure through his Digital Fortress fund.Telegram Messenger states that its end goal is not to bring profit,but it is not structured as a non-profit organization.
Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai.It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests.After Pavel Durov left Russia in 2014, he was said to be moving from country to country with a small group of computer programmers consisting of 15 core members.
Since 2017, the company has been based in Dubai. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. The company says this is done “to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption”. Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process any requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that “to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments”.
However, according to Pavel, Telegram has disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government from Q1 to Q3 of 2024, and a total of 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during the same period. Users can check how many legal requests from their country have been processed by Telegram using the official transparency bot.
Usage
In October 2013, Telegram announced that it had 100,000 daily active users.
On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, with traffic doubling in five months to 2 billion daily messages. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages.
In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily.In December 2017, Telegram reached 180 million monthly active users.By March 2018, that number had doubled, with Telegram reaching 200 million monthly active users.
On 14 March 2019, Pavel said that “3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.”He did not specify what prompted this flood of new sign-ups, but the period matched a prolonged technical outage experienced by Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram.According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as of October 2019, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users worldwide.
In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users,later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024.In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users.
Related platforms
People can use their Telegram accounts to author articles on Telegraph – a minimalistic text editor and publisher. While articles on Telegraph can be published anonymously, tying them to one’s account allows one to check their view count and edit them later. Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser.
When an article is first published, the URL is generated automatically from its title. Non-Latin characters are transliterated, spaces are replaced with hyphens, and the date of publication is added to the address. For example, an article titled “Telegraph (blog platform)” published on 17 November would receive the URL /Telegraph-blog-platform-11-17.
Text formatting options are also minimal: two levels of headings, single-level lists, bold, italics, quotes, and hyperlinks are supported. Authors could upload images and videos to the page, with a limit of 5 MB, however, it has been disabled since September 2024.When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter,
Clients
Telegram has various client apps, some developed by Telegram Messenger LLP and some by the community. Most of them are free and open-source and released under the GNU General Public Licence version 2 or 3. The official clients support sending any file format extensions. The built-in media
viewer supports common media formats – JPEG, PNG, WebP for images and H.264 and HEVC in videos in MP4 container and MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, Opus and AAC for audio. This enables the building of clients for non-traditional platforms like KaiOS (supported by Telekram), or S30+/Mocor Feature phones (still in development).
In 2021, the Telegram team announced a direct build of its Android app. Telegram for Android is available directly from the Telegram website.It is automatically updated and will most likely get new versions faster than the apps in the Play Store and App Store.A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.[citation needed]
Common specifications:
| Name | Platform(s) | Official | Source code license | Support for secret chats | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telegram | Android | Yes | GPLv2 or later[187][188] | Yes | Supports tablets[189] and Wear OS smart watches.[190] Support synchronisation between multiple devices. |
| Telegram | iOS and iPadOS | Yes | GPLv2 or later[187][191] | Yes | Launched in August 2013 for iPhone and iPod Touch and relaunched in July 2014 with support for iPad and Apple Watch.[192] No longer compatible with watchOS. |
| Telegram X | Android[193] | Yes[194] | GPLv3 or later[195] | Yes | An alternative Telegram client written from scratch, with higher speed, slicker animations, themes and more efficient battery use.[196]iOS version is written with Swift. Android version based on TDLib. The iOS version was discontinued, with its code merged with the main Telegram app. |
| Telegram Messenger | Windows Phone | Yes | GPLv2 or later[187] | Yes | Provide synchronization between all platforms. No longer supported. |
| Telegram Desktop | Windows, macOS, and Linux | Yes | GPLv3 with OpenSSL exception[197] | No | Qt-based desktop client. The Windows client is a traditional desktop app published in three flavors (with installer, portable, Windows Store app). The desktop version cannot be used anymore to register and log in, this feature is officially supported by the mobile app only.[63] |
| Telegram | macOS | Yes | GPLv2[198] | Yes | Native macOS client. |
| Telegram Web A / Web K | Web | Yes | GPLv3[199][200] | No | Two web-based versions of Telegram.[201] The web version cannot be used to register and log in, this feature is officially supported by the mobile app only.[202] The code for the legacy web client called Webogram is available as well, though this version is no longer supported.[203] |
See also
- Alt-tech – Internet platforms favored by the alt-right
- Censorship of Telegram
- Comparison of cross-platform instant messaging clients
- Internet privacy – Right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the internet
- Secure instant messaging
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