Du Rove's Channel

The day has come. Telegram channels can now post Stories! Stories on Telegram are more visible than in most apps, because they are displayed right on the main screen. Obviously, we couldn’t let channels flood users with Stories without reasonable limits: this would create too much noise in your Chats. This is why we designed the Boost system. With Boosts, users can give their favorite channels the ability to post stories. More boosts mean more stories per day for a channel. Every 24 hours users can reassign their boost. In the future, boosts will also unlock other features for channels, such as custom reactions, emoji statuses or custom backgrounds. We’ll also introduce more ways for channels to get Boosts. To prevent abuse, only Premium users can boost channels. It shouldn’t be hard to collect Boosts for channels with real subscribers, while those with fake followers may struggle (larger channels need more Boosts to unlock stories). Let the Boost Hunt begin! 🏹

🔍This month we changed how searching public channels and groups works on Telegram. Previously, public channels with more subscribers would appear higher in the search results. That system worked fine for a while, but was increasingly getting abused by spammers. That's why we now only count genuine subscribers of channels for ranking. For example, channels with more Premium subscribers will generally rank higher. However, if a specific Premium subscriber joins too many channels, they won't give those channels as big of a search ranking boost. Of course, the new search also prioritizes results from your country. The feedback on this change is overwhelmingly positive. Channels with an inflated subscribers count have become less visible, while useful groups and mini-apps are now attracting more users. 🚀

Years ago, we built TON – a scalable and fast blockchain technology. TON was designed to serve hundreds of millions of social media users. Since 2020, the TON technology has been maintained and improved by the open source community. Last year, we enabled our users to buy and sell Telegram usernames and IDs on Fragment – a TON-based auction platform. It was a phenomenal success. Telegram sold $120M worth of digital assets in auctions, while early buyers of some Telegram-related digital assets – such as Telegram anonymous numbers – have seen a 27x (!) increase in value after only 9 months. This success showed the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram. For the first time in history, users were allowed to own their social media identities directly. Now we want to integrate blockchain technologies deeper into Telegram. To do that, we worked with the folks from the TON community to add their TON Wallet to Telegram as a mini-app. Starting this November, TON Wallet will be included in the settings and attachment menus for all our users outside the US and some other countries (if you added @wallet and have the latest version of Telegram, you can already see the wallet option in the menus). This step will allow developers to enable hundreds of new valuable features – similar to those pioneered on Fragment. TON Wallet, a third-party mini-app inside Telegram, will introduce a whole new dimension of Web 3.0 to hundreds of millions of Telegram users.

🕯 Happy 🥳 birthday, Telegram! https://telegram.org/blog/stories

➕ Jokes aside, this is what Telegram beta looked like in late 2012. Note the ability to add photos in profile pages (with geotags and reactions!), which is similar to the stories posts we are launching now. Although they weren’t included in the final version 10 years ago, stories have been part of the plan all along!

🎈 This is what Telegram for iOS would look like today if its design hadn't evolved since its launch on the 14th of August, 2013! 🚩🚩1️⃣0️⃣🚩🚩

🥳 Today Telegram turns 10 years old. In just a decade, Telegram gained over 800 million active users purely thanks to word of mouth. Through numerous updates and improvements over the years, Telegram has redefined what a modern messaging experience should be like. The next step for Telegram is to go beyond messaging and spearhead innovation in social media in general. We should use our popularity to change the lives of billions for better, to inspire and uplift people on our planet. Today’s gradual roll-out of stories for all users marks the beginning of this new stage in the history of Telegram. While this past decade was exciting, the next 10 years will be the time when Telegram reaches its true potential. 🥳

Every day, over 2.5 million new users sign up for Telegram, and earlier this year we’ve surpassed 800 million monthly active users. We are happy and grateful, even though this massive growth also means higher expenses on storage and traffic to serve our users. Luckily, Telegram is super efficient when it comes to expenses and we had a great start with monetization last year. While not yet profitable (which would be impossible to reach on just the second year of monetization), Telegram is closer to profitability in absolute numbers than its competitors such as Twitter and Snap. To fund Telegram’s continued growth until we reach the break-even point, this week we issued around $270 million worth of Telegram bonds as a tap of our existing bonds. Once again we've been lucky to have the participation of well-known funds with stellar reputations. I personally bought about a quarter of the new Telegram bonds, investing tens of millions into Telegram’s growth. This comes in addition to the hundreds of millions I spent over the last 10 years to keep Telegram operational. Some people suggested I should have instead bought a house or a jet. But I prefer to stay focused on my work, without “owning” anything (well, apart from Telegram, some Bitcoin and some Toncoin). Hundreds of millions of people signed up for Telegram because they wanted an independent messaging platform that would put its users first. It is my responsibility – and my life’s work – to keep delivering this platform.

For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories. Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn't be Telegram if we didn't listen to our users and didn't innovate on existing formats. So we will be launching Stories soon – in the Telegram way: - Privacy. You will be able to define who can see each of your stories with granular precision: Everyone, only your contacts (with exceptions), a few selected contacts, or a list of Close Friends. - Compact UI. Stories will be placed in an expandable section at the top of your chat list, which makes them easily accessible without taking away valuable space. - Flexibility. It will be easy to hide Stories posted by any contact, moving them to the 'Hidden' list in your Contacts section instead of the main screen. - Captions. In addition to making use of dozens of powerful photo and video-editing tools, you will be able to provide captions for your stories to add more context or links and tag other people. - Dual Camera Support. Building on the success of Telegram's Video Messages, we're adding the option to post photos and videos taken by the front and the rear cameras simultaneously. - Optional Ephemerality. You'll be able to choose when a story expires – in 6, 12, 24, or 48 hours – or permanently display stories on your profile page, with individual privacy settings for each. - More suprises! 🤩 The ability to save your stories to the profile page will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful. You will not only be able to explore more content from your closest contacts, but finally discover more information about users you connect with in groups or channel comments. Speaking of channels, they will benefit from more exposure and subscribers: once we launch the ability to repost messages from channels to stories, going viral on Telegram will become a lot easier. Overall, following our internal tests of Stories, even the skeptics on our team started to appreciate this feature. We can no longer imagine Telegram without it. Stories are in their last testing phase and will become available in early July. This will herald a new era on Telegram, where it will become even more fun and social than it currently is. Check out a preview of Telegram Stories in the next post.

We at Telegram have been very lucky to be able to define the messaging trends for the past decade. Just imagine: a compact team of 30 people has been responsible for creating the majority of the features you now see in modern messaging apps. Our competitors have developed a habit of copying our designs, without any alteration, to the point where it's become a running joke in the community (my favorite recent meme is this one). We take this imitation as a compliment — it shows we're leading the way. While our competitors try to catch up, we will keep implementing top-quality features. My next post is about one of them.

Last week we launched a feature that adds an entire new dimension to Telegram. It allows users to share entire collections of chats, or chat folders. These folders can contain anything – work groups, communities or even curated news feeds. The possibilities are endless. The organizer of the folder can set up different access levels, selecting which of the invitees will see which chats. Those who accept that invite can select which specific chats they want to be visible in the folder or in their Main Chat list. One can even have the same chat included in multiple different chats folders at once. With Chat Folders, the power to organize chat lists is in the hands of each user. Thanks to their unique democratic structure and flexibility, Chat Folders can reshape how Telegram works. And, since most of our innovations are later picked up by the rest of the industry, this feature can eventually redefine how humans communicate.

Telegram's mission is to preserve privacy and freedom of speech around the world. In cases where local laws go against this mission or impose technologically unfeasible requirements, we sometimes have to leave such markets. In the past, countries like China, Iran and Russia have banned Telegram due to our principled stance on the matter of human rights. Such events, while unfortunate, are still preferable to the betrayal of our users and the beliefs we were founded on. In Brazil, a court requested data that is technologically impossible for us to obtain. We are appealing the decision and are looking forward to the final resolution. No matter the cost, we will stand up for our users in Brazil and their right to private communication.

Happy April Fool's day! 🤡 Be careful with this day though! Exactly a year ago my assistant jokingly suggested that since I became a French citizen, I should add a blank space in my last name and become a “Du Rov”. Laughing out loud, we filled out a form to “frenchify” my name, which after a few additional touches became “Paul du Rove”. While we soon forgot about that form, the application actually got approved and the passport reissued 🙈 Thinking about that day, I’m grateful that my assistant’s creativity didn’t extend to my Emirati passport. Otherwise you would be reading this post in “Al Dur’s Channel”.

It has been a year since Telegram started its monetization, but the results have already exceeded our expectations. Unlike other apps, we took a privacy-conscious approach to ads: we decided that no personal data should be used for targeting and that promoted messages should only be shown in public one-to-many channels. Despite that, our ads have significantly outperformed the market and put Telegram on a steady path towards financial sustainability. Telegram Premium, which we introduced just 5 months ago, quickly surpassed 1 million subscribers and has become one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched. While it still represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue, Telegram Premium is growing steadily every day, and one day may even rival our ads. The future looks exciting. The additional monetization strategies I discussed in my previous posts are already bearing fruit, and the features we are working on now will set the foundation for further financial growth for Telegram in 2023. Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users.

The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but ended up being concentrated in the hands of a few who began to abuse their power. As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt. The solution is clear: blockchain-based projects should go back to their roots – decentralization. Cryptocurrency users should switch to trustless transactions and self-hosted wallets that don't rely on any single third party. We, developers, should steer the blockchain industry away from centralization by building fast and easy-to-use decentralized applications for the masses. Such projects are finally feasible today. It took only 5 weeks and 5 people including myself to put together Fragment – a fully decentralized auction platform. We were able to do this because Fragment is based on The Open Network, or TON – a blockchain platform that is fast and efficient enough to host popular applications (unlike Ethereum, which unfortunately remains outdated and expensive even after its recent tweaks). Fragment has been an amazing success, with 50 million USD worth of usernames sold there in less than a month. This week, Fragment will expand beyond usernames. Telegram's next step is to build a set of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and decentralized exchanges for millions of people to securely trade and store cryptocurrencies. This way we can fix the wrongs caused by the excessive centralization, which let down hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users. The time when the inefficiencies of legacy platforms justified centralization should be long gone. With technologies like TON reaching their potential, the blockchain industry should be finally able to deliver on its core mission – giving the power back to the people.

I feel particularly excited about today’s Telegram update. It adds topics to large groups, transforming these linear chats into slick mobile-friendly versions of good old Internet Forums. Ironically, the very first popular internet service I built around 20 years ago was also an Internet Forum – a message board for students of my university, which eventually grew into the biggest student portal in the region. 16 years ago I again incorporated forums into the Communities section of VK, a social network I founded. Since VK was the most popular communication platform in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries, tens of millions of people used the forum feature there. I feel nostalgic about those times: I had yet to learn the skill of hiring engineers and designers back then, so I programmed and designed everything on my own, working 20 hours per day. Today I am fortunate to have the best coding team in the world to recreate the forum experience for hundreds of millions across all platforms in a more modern, fast and accessible form. Telegram will now support organized conversations where thousands of people can concurrently discuss different subjects in the same group. Topics today come packed with lots of features – including the ability to close and pin topics, flexible notification options and lots of fun animated emoji to be used as topic icons. But this is just the start. Taking advantage of the two-week delay caused by Apple’s review, we have begun to expand these new threaded groups into something even more powerful.

Some content creators started using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts. This way, content creators could receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid, which was great. Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices. This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content. I hope that the regulators in the EU, India and elsewhere start taking action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is higher than any government-levied VAT. In the meantime, we at Telegram shall work to offer creators powerful and easy-to-use tools to monetize their content – outside of Apple's restrictive ecosystem.

As promised, we've launched the ability to buy Telegram usernames on a dedicated platform – Fragment. Auctions for the most valuable usernames are already live, so make sure to check it out. In a few days, we will also introduce the ability for users to sell their existing usernames on Fragment. For the first time in the history of social media, a fair, transparent market for usernames is established. Finally people will have ownership over their social media addresses, secured in the immutable ledger of a decentralized blockchain network. This is just the beginning, and yet an important milestone – the power has started to shift into users' hands.

Hackers could have full access (!) to everything on the phones of WhatsApp users. This was possible through a security issue disclosed by WhatsApp itself last week. All a hacker had to do to control your phone was send you a malicious video or start a video call with you on WhatsApp. You are probably thinking "Yeah, but if I updated WhatsApp to the latest version, I am safe, right"? Not really. A WhatsApp security issue exactly like this one was discovered in 2018, then another in 2019 and yet another one in 2020 (tap each year's link to see the corresponding vulnerability). And yes, in 2017 before that. Prior to 2016, WhatsApp didn't have encryption at all. Every year, we learn about some issue in WhatsApp that puts everything on their users' devices at risk. Which means it's almost certain that a new security flaw already exists there. Such issues are hardly incidental – they are planted backdoors. If one backdoor is discovered and has to be removed, another one is added (read the post "Why WhatsApp will never be secure" to understand why). It doesn't matter if you are the richest person on earth – if you have WhatsApp installed on your phone, all your data from every app on your device is accessible, as Jeff Bezos found out in 2020. That's why I deleted WhatsApp from my devices years ago. Having it installed creates a door to get into your phone. I'm not pushing people to switch to Telegram here. With 700M+ active users and 2M+ daily signups, Telegram doesn't need additional promotion. You can use any messaging app you like, but do stay away from WhatsApp – it has now been a surveillance tool for 14 years.

Until recently, 70% of all Telegram usernames had been reserved in inactive channels by cybersquatters from Iran. This created a graveyard of dead usernames that cluttered search results and prevented millions of Telegram users from selecting appropriate public addresses for their accounts, groups and channels. Users who wanted to acquire these reserved usernames often received no response or ended up being scammed. Fortunately, this situation has started to change. In mid-August, we withdrew all public Telegram addresses linked to channels that were empty or inactive for the last year. We will gradually reintroduce 99% of these addresses into public use, this time with algorithmic and geolocation limitations so that more users, and not just a select few, can benefit. As for the highest-valued short usernames, the most efficient and fair way to distribute them seems to be by the auction I mentioned in my previous post. This way, those who acquire these catchy links will be motivated to put them to good use and bring value to our users with original content hosted at recognizable t.me addresses. I don't doubt that those who hoarded Telegram usernames are disappointed, but this change will benefit the vast majority of our users. I look forward to seeing how millions of great Telegram addresses will be revived and finally start serving our community. P.S. In anticipation of the things to come, today we are adding support for dedicated links like username.t.me for every username on Telegram (in addition to t.me/username). These web sites are already functional in any browser.

I'm really impressed by the success of the auction TON recently conducted for their domain/wallet names. Wallet.ton was sold for 215,250 Toncoin (~$260000) while casino.ton was sold for ~$244000. If TON has been able to achieve these results, imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction. In addition to millions of catchy t.me addresses like @storm or @royal, all four-letter usernames could be made available for sale (@bank, @club, @game, @gift etc). This would create a new platform where username holders could transfer them to interested parties in protected deals – with ownership secured on the blockchain via NFT-like smart-contracts. Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, including channels, stickers or emoji, could later also become part of this marketplace. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON probably has the best technology to host such decentralized sales. Our team can write bullet-proof smart contracts for TON (since it was us who invented its smart-contract language), so we are inclined to try out TON as the underlying blockchain for our future marketplace. Let's see if we can add a little bit of Web 3.0 to Telegram in the coming weeks.

It was an interesting engineering challenge to ensure that hundreds of vector-based emoji with smooth animations could simultaneously play on the screen of any mobile phone. Telegram is the first company ever to have implemented this in a mobile app. Adding custom emoji to the text of any message is just the first step of the upcoming visual revolution on Telegram. In a few weeks, users will be able to add any custom emoji as a reaction to a message and display an emoji as their current status next to their name. All of this will become available to Premium subscribers first, because they are the ones who make it possible for Telegram to stay free and private for everyone.

After extensive media coverage of my previous post, Apple got back to us with a demand to water down our pending Telegram update by removing Telemoji – higher quality vector-animated versions of the standard emoji. This is a puzzling move on Apple's behalf, because Telemoji would have brought an entire new dimension to its static low-resolution emoji and would have significantly enriched their ecosystem. But it's good for Telegram long term, as we will now make Telemoji even more unique and recognizable. Besides, we have included 10 other emoji packs in today's update – together with the ability for any user to upload their own emoji.

I love my work. What could be more exciting than improving the way hundreds of millions of people communicate? Members of our team, myself included, must be some of the luckiest people alive. The only thing that we find discouraging is that we're often unable to distribute the new versions of Telegram due to the obscure "review process" imposed on all mobile apps by the tech monopolies. For example, our upcoming update – which is about to revolutionize how people express themselves in messaging – has been stuck in Apple's "review" for two weeks, without explanation or any feedback provided by Apple. If Telegram, one of the top 10 most popular apps globally, is receiving this treatment, one can only imagine the difficulties experienced by smaller app developers. It's not just demoralizing: it causes direct financial losses to hundred of thousands of mobile apps globally. This harm goes on top of the 30% tax Apple and Google take from app developers – which, according to them, is supposed to pay for the resources needed to review apps. The regulators in the EU and elsewhere are slowly starting to look into these abusive practices. But the economic damage that has already been inflicted by Apple on the tech industry won't be undone.

Happy Solstice! ☀️✨ 🎉 Telegram now has over 700 million monthly users. We have also launched the Premium subscription on most devices. The beauty of Telegram Premium is that if just 2,5-3% of our users sign up for this subscription, Telegram will cover its costs, supported purely by its users. This will herald a new, user-centric era in the history of social media services. Thank you for loving Telegram! We ❤️ you back.

Telegram Web provides an extraordinary experience on desktops, but it also works great on mobile devices. It is prevented, however, of reaching native-app-level quality on iOS, because Apple limits web developers in terms of what they can do on iPhones and iPads. In April, the developer of Telegram Web K shared a 10-point list of issues in the iOS Safari browser that Apple has been unwilling to fix or improve for years. Check it here for technical details. We suspect that Apple may be intentionally crippling its Web apps to force its users to download more native apps where Apple is able to charge its 30% commission (I wrote about why it is harmful here). Fortunately, regulators have started to realise what is going on. This week, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), a UK regulator, concluded:

"Apple bans alternatives to its own browser engine on its mobile devices; a restriction that is unique to Apple. The CMA is concerned this severely limits the potential for rival browsers to differentiate themselves from Safari (for example, on features such as speed and functionality) and limits Apple’s incentives to invest in its browser engine.

This restriction also seriously inhibits the capability of web apps – apps that run on a browser rather than having to be individually downloaded – depriving consumers and businesses of the full benefits of this innovative technology."

I think it's an accurate summary and and hope that regulatory action will follow soon. It's sad that, more than ten years after Steve Job's death, a company that once revolutionized mobile web turned into its most significant roadblock.

Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled. And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone. After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That's why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first. Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don't subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way. While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority.

The media often calls me a billionaire, but, unlike most billionaires, I don't own jets, yachts, cars or houses. Creating things always seemed to me a more rewarding activity than engaging in consumption.