Why Telegram has become the best messaging app in the world

When WhatsApp went down for four hours this weekend, almost five million people signed up for messaging service Telegram. The app skyrocketed to the top of the App Store charts, and is now the top free app in forty six countries from Germany to Ecuador. In the US and several other countries, the app is no. One in the social networking category, ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik, and others.

It’s not instantly clear why Telegram emerged as the alternative of choice following WhatsApp’s downtime. Users could have switched to Kik, or Facebook Messenger, or LINE — all of which have hundreds of millions of users. There’s seemingly something different about Telegram. Its rise isn’t only due to WhatsApp’s acquisition and subsequent downtime. "We have been the no. One app in Spanish, Arabic, and several Latin American app stores for several weeks before the Facebook deal happened," says Telegram’s Markus Ra. "The growth was there — so the WhatsApp acquisition and problems merely multiplied the effect across all affected countries." According to app analytics site App Annie, Telegram embarked truly gaining steam on February 17th, days before the WhatsApp news even hit.

Built by the pioneering Durov brothers behind Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte (also known as VK), Telegram is a messaging service combining the speed of WhatsApp with Snapchat’s ephemerality and advanced fresh security measures. WhatsApp might have heralded the very first time we heard of Telegram, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Telegram feels in many ways like a straight-up clone of WhatsApp, from its green double-checkmark read receipts to its cartoonish wallpapers. There’s also the usual gamut of messaging app features including the capability to see a friend’s online status and fasten photos, movies, your location, contacts, and documents to messages. But where it lacks originality, Telegram makes up for it in speed and security features. "Telegram is the fastest and most secure mass market messaging system in the world," the company claims, which it attributes in part to Nikolai Durov’s open-sourced MTProto protocol. Telegram was in fact built as a testing bed for MTProto, Reuters reported when the app launched back in August. The company is so certain in the security of MTProto that it’s suggesting $200,000 to anyone who can crack it. It’s not unusual for companies to suggest bug bounties, but bounties of this size are generally only reserved for critical bugs in widely used apps like Windows.

"The no. One reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies," Durov told TechCrunch. Durov built in a feature that lets you begin a "Secret Talk" with any of your friends. According to Telegram, Secret Talks suggest end-to-end encryption, leave no trace on the company’s servers, and let you set Snapchat-esque self-destruct timers on messages that range from two seconds to one week. There’s also the capability to check the security of your Secret Talks using an photo that serves as an encryption key. By comparing your encryption key to a friend’s, you can effectively verify that your conversation is secure and less vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, the company says. But despite Telegram’s alleged sophistication, no cryptographic method is infallible. The company has, in fact, already doled out $100,000 to one developer for finding a critical bug, TechCrunch reports.

"The no. One reason for me to [help launch] Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies."

Telegram is interesting not just because of its stringent security standards, but also because it permits any developer to build a Telegram client of their own, and even for desktop computers. Most fresh messaging services today, including WhatsApp, build one-size-fits-all messaging apps and lock out third-party developers. It’s hard to blame them, since maintaining one federated language and security paradigm across dozens of apps is difficult. Also, making money off of a platform takes more thought than making money off a ordinary paid app. Yet, the Durovs’ VKontakte found a lot of success letting developers build alternate versions of its site. More importantly, Telegram operates as a non-profit organization, and doesn’t plan to charge for its services.

"Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads or accept outside investment. It also cannot be sold," the company writes in its FAQ. "We’re not building a ‘user base,’ we are building a messenger for the people." If Telegram ever "runs out" of the money supplied by the Durov brothers, the company says, it will ask for donations from its users. Telegram’s noble goals echo the sentiments of many bright-eyed startup founders, but with the Durovs’ pocketbook in mitt and the service’s open API available to third-party developers, it may actually have a chance at fulfilling its goals. Telegram isn’t a CryptoCat for the masses, considering it uses your phone number, of all things, as an identifier — but it’s an significant step towards finding a very encrypted messaging platform that’s accessible to anyone.

"Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads."

Championing an ostensibly noble objective, free services, and the practice of VKontakte’s creators, Telegram would seem like a good alternative to any of the leading messages apps out there. After WhatsApp’s acquisition news and downtime, the app is spiking at the right time. The company incentivized several million fresh users into switching over, but keeping those users will be a continuous challenge. "The switching cost for users on a phone number-based messaging services is at or near zero," argues Union Square Ventures fucking partner Albert Wenger in a blog post, but that’s only half the story. A network is only as strong as the number of friends you have using it, and coaxing all of your friends to switch is no effortless task. If Facebook thought that WhatsApp users were liable to switch at a moment’s notice, it wouldn’t have paid $Nineteen billion for the company.

Facebook paid for WhatsApp’s user base, but also for its brand — a brand that spent years solving a very significant problem: that it costs a fortune to text across borders. Perhaps the next messaging problem to solve is individual security, considering WhatsApp’s alleged cryptographic weaknesses and the NSA’s data collection policies. WhatsApp became synonymous with texting. Perhaps for Telegram to succeed, it will need to become synonymous with security.

Related video: