Whatsapp Competitor Telegram Gains 35 Million Monthly Users

The mobile messaging segment has exploded! So many cross-platform mobile messengers have occupied the landscape, differentiation seems difficult at best. Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp for $19 billion is probably the biggest indicator of the peaks to which mobile messaging has reached. While it is an understatement to say that mobile internet based messengers have replaced SMS, these products are now looking set to replace voice calling as well, thus racing towards making cellular calling and texting obsolete.

And in this climate, there seems to be a new messaging app that’s on the rise. Telegram, a messenger being developed by the founders behind VK.com, a European social network is seeing some very good adoption and growth numbers, interestingly right after Facebook’s acquisition of Whatsapp.

Telegram, on the face of it seems to be Whatsapp clone, when it comes to messaging features and design. However, when you use the messenger you realize that this is probably the messenger that you have always desired. It is fast, secure and cross-platform – some of the advantages it has because of its open design and API offerings. While the official messenger is available for Android and iOS, there are many unofficial Telegram apps being made by independent developers to bring the app to many different platforms. A look at the unofficial app selection on their website shows that the messenger service is currently available for Chrome, Windows, Windows Phone, Mac, Linux and even the command line (terminal) in Linux!

The server side technology is proprietary but their client side implementations are open source. That along with its API documentation and protocol lets any developer build their own apps for the telegram service. This is quite a novel way of going about building a product and this might be a damn good way for the service to reach out and amass more users. Speaking of users, the relatively young app is now seeing a monthly user count of 35 million, according to a tweet put out yesterday. Daily active users number up to 15 million and monthly message count is around 8 billion [Source: Techcrunch]. These are extremely awesome numbers for a product that had 100,000 daily active users last October. In fact, when Facebook announced its Whatsapp acquisition, the number of people jumping onto Telegram spiked and the app received 5 million downloads in the span of a single day!

Moving on, Telegram has some superb privacy focused features. Messages sent through Telegram are heavily encrypted and can self destruct. Users can enter secret chat sessions with other users. The difference between secret chats and normal chats is that secret chats are encrypted end to end as opposed to normal chats which use client-server encryption. This means that secret chats are way more secure than the normal chats on the service and could be easily used to discuss very sensitive and private topics. The service also lets you access messages from multiple devices, something Whatsapp currently does not allow. Much has been said about how fast Telegram is and even though this is touted to be a special feature, there has been no information on how fast it actually is. In terms of my subjective opinion, it seems to be pretty fast. There are no limits on the size of media that you can send in your messages. The telegram servers are distributed globally so as to protect the service better and serve messages at faster speeds. And it is free forever, without any ads or subscription fees. That begs the question, how will it ever make money? The founders and the company have not touched on that topic yet.

I checked out Telegram last month when I came across it online. Even though it was a fantastic messenger, there was no one on it (my friend circle and contacts) and that was a bummer. However, after the Whatsapp acquisition, I saw a gradual uptick in the number of my friends who have joined the service. India is Whatsapp territory but better features and no fees would definitely ensure that more Indians start using it.

Given the recent revelations of NSA snooping and our own Indian Government setting up mass data collection systems like CMS, I am extremely comfortable using software like Telegram. I am glad that the Snowden leaks are giving form to a wave of software which cares foremost about user privacy and security instead of just providing features.

Have you used Telegram yet? What are your thoughts about it?

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