Telegram Tops 1 Billion Downloads

Popular instant messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, according to Sensor Tower. From a report: The Dubai-headquartered app, which was launched in late 2013, surpassed the milestone on Friday, the mobile insight firm told TechCrunch. As is the case with the app's chief rival, WhatsApp, India is the largest market for Telegram. The world's second largest internet market represents approximately 22% of its lifetime installs, Sensor Tower said.

Gotta wonder what that means, exactly....

[Seven Spirals]

Does it mean it's popular because it's secure, or does it mean that it's popular because Apple, Google, and Gubmints can actually decrypt it? Like the licks on a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

Re:

[gosso920]

And how many of those users are OnlyFans refugees?

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Probably only the fat ones. The others are still there cashing out. I think OnlyFans bitched-out on the porn ban.

Re: Gotta wonder what that means, exactly....

[John.Banister]

It means 10 Trillion stickers attached to Telegram messages.

Re:

[BAReFO0t]

AFAIK it's encrypted, but only to the Telegram servers.
Effectively like WhatsApp.

(Just that WhatsApp at least says it uses the encryption tech Signal gifted to them, even if pointlessly, given that the NSA and Zuckerberg can still read every message.)

And another thing that bugs me about Telegram's true encryption mode, is that last time I checked, it only worked if both sides were online at the same time to initialize it. Something I found almost impossible in real-life situations. You had to tell the other

Re:

[BAReFO0t]

It means it's popular because people heard it's popular.

Period.

I call it the Flappy Bird effect.

Mind, that hearing that it is popular is not the same as it being popular. Ceci 'n est pas une pipe. [wikipedia.org]

At best, you can add that the reason people are looking for it, is that they were disgruntled with Facebook and WhatsApp trying to be their nannies, justified or not, while Telegram has more of a Hardcore Henry* flair, stemming from its also Russian origins. (Example: The YouTube song ripping bot.)

If people don't h

Not interested

[Rotting]

I'll stick with Signal, thanks.

https://signal.org/ [signal.org]

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

I simply like Signal more. However, I'm not sure it's better security wise. Who knows what they can and can't crack these days and there is still no encryption that can defeat rubber hose decryption.

Re:Not interested

[BAReFO0t]

I know.

1. Telegram is NOT open source. End of story, right there.
2. Telegram does NOT end-to-end encrypt by default. End of story, again. No further arguments needed.
3. I actually checked Signal's claims. Whenever I thought it might be insecure, I simply hadn't understood it yet, or it was an unavoidable evil.
4. If you use an instant messenger on a standard Android system on a standard smartphone, there is nothing Signal or Telegram can do about any of the code and hardware it relies on. Google, and all the manufacturers of your phone's components can still put in backdoors. Because they want to, or because somebody points a NSL or gun at them. Just like your landlord could have built a pinhole camera right into the ceiling. And in any case, anybody can break in, and put something inside your phone.

The weakest point will probably simply be a minor Android system update with forged certificates. The kind of thing that is trivial for any of the sometimes quite obscure companies and state agencies in your list of trusted root certificates in your phone's settings.

I hope this helps.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

It does help. Good list. The main reason I use it on Android is because it can take over as the SMS app also, and I trust Signal like 1000000x more than Google.

Re:

[vux984]

I'd also say signal is a cut-above for security; no question.

However Telegram is more user friendly, and has more features, and can do some convenient things thanks to the security compromises - such as not doing E2E by default.

IMO - they are different tools for different jobs, and I use both.

Re:

[Darkling-MHCN]

Naah... not open source... so easy to talk total absolute BS...

https://github.com/overtake/Te... [github.com]
https://github.com/telegramdes... [github.com]
https://github.com/tdlib/td [github.com]

Re:

[Luckyo]

1. Fake news. Telegram client is open source. You can literally build your own today:

https://github.com/tdlib/td [github.com]

2. When it comes to practical rather than hypothetical security, Telegram is actually known for being the only major IM client to deny US intelligence data on content of the messages when requested. Relevant agencies had to socially engineer their way into the relevant group, and then ask for individual client data based on messages they saw in said group, and that's the only thing that Telegram g

Re:

[Darkling-MHCN]

Yes. This google...

https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com] ...shows 274,000 pages with telegram in the page. A good percentage of those would projects linked to the Telegram messenger.

Telegram would probably be the largest open source community of any messaging client on the planet right now.

Re: Not interested

[aRTeeNLCH]

Your list fails to add one particular thing that I once found about Telegram, the data is unencrypted or at least accessible to the system, but resides in different regions (think UK, EU and Switzerland or some such combination), which means that it can't be just requested in one jurisdiction, it must be requested in a collaboration on all three.

Re:

[Opportunist]

Well, there is zero-knowledge encryption. If you don't know the key, no rubberhose cracking can extract it from your skull.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

True, but if you have any mechanism to decrypt, I'm pretty sure it would emerge. If not, then I'm not sure how helpful that would have been in the first place. I suppose there is some kind of application for such a thing?

Re:

[Opportunist]

"Whoopsie, maybe you shouldn't have removed that computer, because that tripped the wire that trashed the data. Well, next time maybe ask me..."

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Oh, I get it. Sounds like a great plot twist in a crime movie. Dumb cops have all the data they need then, *poof*.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

... but quick question. In that scenario would there actually be encryption used, or just a booby trap ? I'm just trying to figure out if there is some kind of special mechanism for "zero knowledge" encryption that would do this. I googl'd it and all the descriptions just sounded like it was a scenario where some 3rd party warehoused the ciphertext without having the key but there was a user somewhere who still had it. So, to me, that's not really "zero knowledge" it's just like holding a black box for some

Re:

[Powercntrl]

I'll stick with Signal, thanks.

Let me guess, most people don't use Signal so you're evangelizing it in the hope it becomes more popular?

I vote we bring back AIM. I miss that piss yellow stick figure man.

Re:

[Luckyo]

You can have that as background in pretty much every mainstream IM client.

Re:

[Luckyo]

It hasn't been about the app but the content on the app for the longest time. In case of whatsapp, the content is that everyone has it and uses it for IM in many countries.

In case of telegram, the content is the amazing channels constantly feeding content for everything from Belarussian political dissenters to videos of car crashes to a potted plant growing channel with detailed instructions on how to grow what's been shown.

In case of signal, there's nothing as far as I can tell. Only a tiny fraction of peo

1billion clueless people

[BAReFO0t]

Who never heard the phrase "end-to-end encryption (enabled by default, for everything, always)".
1 billion people that we failed to reach.

I think it's time to stop messing around and start stepping up the game:

Telegram is NOT secure. It's just WhatsApp with Facebook/NSA replaced by the Russian government. And some candy to make it go down.
Use Signal or better! Otherwise you haven't changed a thing!

Can you say that with confidence? Try it.
If not, then you know why the world is the way it is:

Re:

[Luckyo]

You're not going to mention the fact that it's the only platform on record to openly deny access to message content to both US and Russian authorities as well as pretty much all other authorities when requested as far as we know, are you? They're the only ones who limit government request to ID of message sender if they're presented with contents of offending message, and only if offense contained in messages is severe (i.e. terrorism and child porn)?

Didn't think so.

So yes, we can say that Telegram has the

Concerns

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

I've long had major concerns about Telegram. People can exchange a ton of information in it (you can actually send up to 2GB files to your friends) and all the information is stored in the cloud, i.e. on Telegram servers. There's no limit on how many such files you can send. This all becomes quite an expensive affair fast considering the app has this huge number of users and there are literally hundreds of thousands of groups where people exchange content. Where does the money to finance the company come from? There are no ads in the app, it doesn't sell or push anything.

Secondly, since everything is stored in the could in plain text, Telegram has full access to all your chats and files being exchanged. This sounds quite alarming. Of course there's a secret peer-to-peer chat which uses client-to-client encryption but people rarely use it and most are simply not aware of it.

Re:

[Darkling-MHCN]

It's funded by Pavel Durov. His money comes from selling 12% of Vkontakte for $300M USD and in 2018 he and his brother Nikolai Durov, raised $1.7 billion from investors to create TON, a blockchain system based on Telegram. Telegram is costing about $1M a month to run. Eventually they'll need to either sell it off or find a way of monetizing it. Introducing a freemium model. They're currently based in Dubai, not Russia.

Re:

[jrumney]

They're currently based in Dubai, not Russia.

Well that just makes me feel so much better about trusting them. /s

Re:

[Luckyo]

It should. Dubai is the place where even Taliban and IS go to for negotiations with US. They're well known to be neutral in world affairs even when pressured to extreme degree to intervene.

Re:

[jrumney]

They are also well known for spying on telecommunications of people that are a threat to the ruler, including his own family members.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Certainly. But local and foreign are strictly separated. If you're a foreigner that has no major interests in Dubai, this is one of the safest places in the world for your telecommunications needs if not the safest.

Re:

[jrumney]

You keep believing that if you want. [theguardian.com]

Re:

[Luckyo]

Have you read your own link yet? It doesn't support your claim. It merely states that UAE was tracking a few hundred UK phones.

Now take a guess how many people in UK have significant interests in UAE. I'd say a few hundred is a very conservative guess considering City interests alone.

Re: Concerns

[flyingfsck]

Yeah, right. Another sucker who has never even done a stop over in Dubai.

Re:

[Luckyo]

"I did a stop over, and got strip searched, they must anally probe everyone!"

Show us on this doll where airport security touched you.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Yes, airport security does that, and so does immigration, worldwide. And so does Chinese police, and more.

Are you sure you want to criticise methods widely used by Chinese police, my little China troll?

Re:

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Telegram is costing about $1M a month to run.

This is widely inaccurate, source [thebell.io]: this year, server costs alone will reach $220 million which is $18.33 a month.

Re: Concerns

[aRTeeNLCH]

The owner/funder has gone on record that he's looking at monetising it, saying it should bring in several hundred million per year, if memory serves.

Telegram, where disinformation is rampant

[Generic User Account]

All major technological deficiencies aside, Telegram is on par with 4chan when it comes to misleading people. If you've been wondering how Russia does it, Telegram is how. If Telegram were a part of town, you wouldn't go there.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Like all messaging platforms, it's what you subscribe to. Unlike most other messaging platforms, Telegram doesn't actively censor for political reasons, so if you want that sort of stuff, you'll find it there. Just like if you want good channel on growing potted plants, or watch videos of cars crashing, or follow political dissenters anywhere from Belarus to US, they're all there.

Subscribe to whatever you want or don't. It's your choice. And that's the main advantage of telegram over everything else.

Telegram is the best

[oxicage]

Telegram is the best messaging app/service out there. Use it on the iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Windows desktop, Linux desktop. I wouldn't mind paying $2 a year for the service, similar to what pre-Facebook WhatsApp did where it wasn't even mandatory. One big advantage of Telegram is that it not US-based or owned, which is a feature itself.