Telegram, a messaging app launched by Pavel Durov less than three years ago, has passed 100 million monthly active users (MAUs), the company announced yesterday.
Revealing the figure during a keynote at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Durov also said that the service is now signing up 350,000 new users each day. Telegram users in 200 countries send 15 billion messages daily, up from 12 billion last September.
“We’re extremely proud and happy that all this growth is 100 percent organic — we had zero marketing budget,” Durov said during his keynote. “This is a global phenomenon, a global product.”
However, Telegram still has a ways to go to equal its competitors. Facebook-owned WhatsApp recently flew past one billion MAUs, and Facebook Messenger is close to that number too, notes VentureBeat.
Telegram passed the marker of 10 million downloads as in early 2014, and reached 60 million active users in May 2015.
Protecting user privacy or helping terrorists?
Telegram, which syncs across all devices — including desktops — and stores messages for free in its cloud, claims to be faster and more user-friendly than its competitors.
The protection of user privacy, however, has been presented as one of the app’s key features from the very beginning.
The messenger uses the MTProto, a data transfer protocol developed by Durov’s brother Nikolai. According to Durov, the developers had built the system on the assumption that all communication channels are tapped, and therefore added enough intricacy to its original code to safeguard users against any breach of privacy. Neither security agencies nor even Telegram’s own systems administrators can get access to user chats, Durov claimed in 2013.
These assertions seemed sadly confirmed last month when, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, Telegram was pointed out as being a privileged means of communication for jihadists.
However, not all encryption experts agree with Telegram’s claim of full confidentiality, as reported recently by East-West Digital News.
What’s more, in late 2015, Telegram was put under pressure by the Russian authorities to put an end to the “total anonymity” of user exchanges. Durov answered that his company will not allow security agencies to access such content.
“We have not issued and will not issue personal data and encryption keys to third parties,” he wrote.
