Telegram (software)
Telegram is a cloud-based, cross-platform social media and instant messaging service. It launched for iOS on 14 August 2013 and Android on 20 October 2013. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls as well as public livestreams. It is available for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web browsers. Telegram offers end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls, and optionally in private chats if both participants use a mobile device.
Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create public groups with up to 200,000 members, and share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels.
Telegram was founded in 2013 by Pavel and Nikolai Durov. Its servers are distributed worldwide with several data centers, and its headquarters are in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021, with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021., registration to Telegram requires either a phone number and a smartphone or one of a limited number of non-fungible tokens issued in 2022.
Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users, with India as the country with the most users.
History
Development
Telegram was launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Previously, the pair founded the Russian social network VK, which they left in 2014, saying it had been taken over by the government. Pavel sold his remaining stake in VK and left Russia after resisting government pressure. Nikolai created the MTProto protocol that is the basis for the messenger, while Pavel provided financial support and infrastructure through his Digital Fortress fund. Telegram Messenger denies that its end goal is to profit, but it is not structured as a nonprofit organization.Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to "shelter the team from unnecessary influence" and protect users from governmental data requests. After Pavel Durov left Russia in 2014, he was said to be moving from country to country with a small group of computer programmers consisting of 15 core members.
While a former employee of VK said that Telegram had employees in Saint Petersburg, Pavel said the Telegram team made Berlin, Germany, its headquarters in 2014, but failed to obtain German residence permits for everyone on the team and moved to other jurisdictions in early 2015. Since 2017, the company has been based in Dubai. Its data centers are spread across a complex corporate structure of shell companies in various jurisdictions to avoid compliance with government subpoenas. The company says this is done "to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption". Telegram's FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that "to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments". But according to Pavel, Telegram disclosed data for 203 legal requests from the Brazilian government in January to September 2024 and 6,992 legal requests from India, its largest market, during that period. Users can use Telegram's transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.
Usage
In October 2013, Telegram announced that it had 100,000 daily active users.On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, traffic doubled in five months with 2 billion daily messages. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages.
In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily. In December 2017, Telegram reached 180 million monthly active users. By March 2018, that number had doubled, with Telegram reaching 200 million monthly active users.
On 14 March 2019, Pavel said that "3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours." He did not specify what prompted this flood of new sign-ups, but the period matched a prolonged technical outage experienced by Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as of October 2019, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users worldwide.
On 24 April 2020, Telegram announced that it had reached 400 million monthly active users.
On 8 January 2021, Pavel announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached "about 500 million" monthly active users. In August, TechCrunch reported that India was Telegram's largest market, with a 22% share of total installs coming from the region. Telegram then gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates on 5 October 2021.
On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users.
In July 2023, Telegram surpassed 800 million monthly active users, later reaching 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million in July 2024. In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram surpassed 1 billion monthly active users.
Features
Messaging
To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform. Changing the phone number in the app will automatically reassign the user's account to that number without exporting data or notifying their contacts. Phone numbers are hidden by default, with only a user's contacts able to see them. Sign-ups can be done only on an Android or iOS device.Messages users send and receive are tied to their numbers and custom usernames, not the device. Telegram content is synced between users' logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. By default, any account that is inactive for 6 months is deleted, but the period can be shortened or extended up to 18 months. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts.
Messages can contain formatted text, media, files up to 2 GB, locations, and audio or video messages recorded in-app. Telegram messages in private chats can be edited for up to 48 hours; an "edited" icon indicates changes. Messages may also be deleted for both sides without a trace. Users may delete messages and whole chats for both themselves and other participants. Chats can be exported to preserve them via Telegram's Desktop client, but the saved data cannot be imported back into the user's account.
Users can import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one.
As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a "cloud draft" that syncs with others, so that typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example.
Any message can be translated by opening the context menu. Premium users can translate a whole chat with one click. Users can hide the translate button for messages written in specific languages.
Reactions can be used to respond to a message with emoji. Premium users have access to more reaction choices and can leave more reactions per message. Reactions are always on in private chats and can be enabled by admins in groups and channels. Specific reactions can be allowed or excluded. Reaction emoji play an animation with special effects.
Users can also send stickers, which can be static, animated or video. Sticker packs are made by Telegram designers as well as regular users and can be shared via links. They use the WebP or WebM format and do not require special software to create or upload. Some stickers feature full-screen effects that play out when first sent or when tapped.
Users can schedule messages to send at a particular time or when their conversation partner comes online, as well as choose to send a message "without sound" without a notification. Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender's identity or to hide captions from media messages. Forwarded messages also maintain reply formatting, able to show which messages in a thread are replying to others. Any user can also send a message to a special "Saved Messages" chat as a form of bookmarking them. The contents of the chat are only visible to the user.
Chats can be sorted into folders to organize them with preset options like "Unread" and "Muted" or custom separations such as "Work" and "Family". Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app.
Users have the option to start a one-on-one, end-to-end-encrypted "Secret Chat", which remains accessible only on the device on which it started and self-destructs upon logging out. Secret Chats restrict screenshotting by Android devices and warn when one is taken on an iOS device, while also hiding the chat contents from the final image. Secret Chats support perfect forward secrecy and switch encryption keys after a key has been used 100 times or a week has passed. Secret Chats are available only on Android, iOS, and macOS clients.
Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from one day to one year.