Along with Whatsapp, Messenger and , Telegram is one of the most used messaging applications in the world, and has experienced great growth in the last two years, as a result of the successive controversies about the privacy of the undisputed leader in the sector, Whatsapp .
However, the history of Telegram begins much longer ago.
Telegram, an app with 550 million users
Telegram was first launched on August 14, 2013, having been developed by the Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Currently, Telegram has functions that go beyond sending and receiving messages: you can share videos, gifs, voice notes, stickers, etc.; In addition, over time, other communication functions have been incorporated, such as video calls both individual and group, a feature that emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of teleworking.
One of the great attractions of Telegram is in its channels (public or private), which are managed either by companies or by private users, and which can be followed by an almost unlimited number of people. Each of these channels has very particular functions: from providing news to accessing entertainment content. We ourselves have our own channel, in which we publish job offers in the marketing and eCommerce sector.
Another highlight of this app is your safety, with an end-to-end encryption system that makes conversations protected. This encryption system is, in fact, behind some of the problems that the application has suffered in Russia, as the Telegram team did not agree to share the encryption codes with the Russian government. Other countries that at some point have established limitations of some kind to the app, from a complete ban to blocking specific channels, have been Belarus, China or . In Germany, the app itself has agreed to block channels that incite hate, after pressure from the local government.
According to the WeAreSocial and Hootsuite report as of January 2022, Telegram had around 550 million monthly users worldwide. In Spain, according to a study by , a 33% of Spanish users used Telegram several times a day during 2021while a 27% used it once a day last year. Similarly, Telegram was
In its evolution, Telegram has not forgotten about online payments. Since 2017, the Durov brothers’ app allowed users to securely buy any product or service from the app, as long as it was through a payment bot. A new update released in 2021 allowed businesses towithout the need to use bots or leave the app. This thanks to the integration of 8 different providers of payments to third parties, among which Stripe. In this way, Telegram is positioned as a useful tool so that any type of business, even if it does not have a website or online store, can collect its orders 100% digitally.
Brief history of Telegram
Russia is currently in the eye of the storm due to the military invasion of Ukraine. This has resulted in many world-renowned brands leaving that country in protest after the conflict. In the meantime, Russia has been sanctioned from every point of view, including technology.
But does Telegram run the same risk? According to Pavel Durov, Although both he and his brother are Russian, Telegram is not a Russian app.. In fact, its centers of operations are divided between it and the United Arab Emirates.
Actually Telegram is an app that It is not viewed favorably from the Kremlin. As we said, the app emerged in 2013, in the midst of the war in the Donbas region (Ukraine) and served as mechanism of communication between those groups that organized protests against the regime of Vladimir Putin both in Moscow and in the Ukrainian capital, kyiv.
Putin demanded that Dúrov close these groups and that they hand over the data of each one of them, to which he refused. The consequences? Durov was stripped of (VK), the «Russian Facebook» created by him in 2012, first passing into the hands ofAlisher Usmanov, ally of Putin, and subsequently to Telegram was even banned in Russia in 2018, but the service was later restored in that country.
Durov had to leave Russia and currently lives between , Dubai and the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
But despite enjoying a reputation as a highly secure app, it has also turned out to be counterproductive in the sense that, for example, extremist and criminal organizations can resort to using it to communicate with each other, as uncovered by an investigation by There is also a huge amount of information channels dedicated to spreading hoaxes (fake news) through it.
Due to the current crisis in Russia and Ukraine, Durov had thought about the possibility of temporarily suspending the service in both countries, since, in his own words, “the risk is growing that it will become a tool to spread or unverify, and that it could be used to incite ethnic hatred.”
However, this app has become as essential for both the Ukrainians and the Russians themselves who do not support the war: they use it to get truthful information, as do journalists on the ground and in the newsrooms and even the president himself from Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky, who has an official channel on it where every day he informs his citizens and the world where the day after the attack he resorted to that channel to call his Ukrainian compatriots to the resistance.
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