Telegram reached 900 million monthly users

Half of these 900 millions users open Telegram daily. According to DataAI, Telegram is the 6th most used and 6th most downloaded app in the world. 

What’s more  Telegram was cash flow positive in the 1st quarter of 2024 and is on track to become profitable this year. This solidifies our position as an independent company that puts its users first. When we started developing Telegram 12 years ago, we believed that people are inherently smart. And smart people will always choose the freedom and quality of Telegram over the restrictions and mediocrity of legacy apps. It seems we were right.

New Telegram Monetization System

A source close to Telegram talked to Durov's Code on the specifics of the new monetization system. Here are the main points of the article :

• The Telegram Advertising Platform  now allows purchasing ads only with TON. Payment by fiat currency remains available only to advertising agencies: their personal accounts on the Telegram website still allow this.

• Ads purchased with TON can only be targeted to specific channels. It is impossible to target them to any topic or location. Such ads cannot contain external links, but the entry threshold for buying them is only 20 TON.

• Ads purchased with TON aren't displayed to channel subscribers if the phone numbers linked to their accounts are issued by Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, or Germany.

• The "Monetization" tab is available in the channel statistics section only if at least half of the channel's subscribers have phone numbers issued outside of Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, or Germany, and the total number of channel subscribers exceeds 1,000. The location of the channel owner and the phone number of their account do not affect the display of the "Monetization" tab.

• Even if the "Monetization" tab is not displayed on a channel, the channel owner's account will still receive funds from ads purchased with TON and shown to their channel's subscribers. However, they will not be able to withdraw these funds until the conditions from the previous point are met.

Introducing Telegram Business

Starting today, anyone can turn their Telegram account into a business account – and get access to business features, such as opening hours, location, quick replies, automated messages, custom start page, chatbot support, and more.

Introducing Telegram Business

Telegram has long allowed developers to build powerful bots and mini-apps which were widely used by businesses.

Starting today, any user can easily use business features — without any coding skills.

Hours and Location

Businesses can display their hours of operation and show their location on a map.

Users will know where to find you and immediately see if you're open.

Start Page

Businesses can customize their start page for empty chats, choosing which text and sticker people see before they start a conversation.

This lets you showcase info about products and services or welcome customers with branded artwork.

Quick Replies

Telegram Business allows you to create quick replies. Quick replies are shortcuts for sending preset messages that may contain several messages and support text formatting, links, stickers, media, and files.

This helps you quickly send information that your customers often need – like a schedule of classes or a PDF with your menu.

Typing a / in the message bar shows a panel with all of your quick replies – that you can send or edit in one tap. This only works in private chats, not groups.

Greeting Messages

For more automation, you can set a greeting message that will be sent to users who contact you for the first time. This will ensure they get an instant reply with important info – or just a friendly hello. 

Your greeting may also include answers to frequent questions or more details about your business.

You can specify a period after which a new message will result in your greeting being sent again.

Away Messages

You can also set an away message to be sent when your business is closed or while you're on vacation.

This way people will always know when they can expect a response from your business.

To prevent sending business messages to friends, family, or employees, you can limit any automated messages to exclude specific chats or entire chat categories.

Tags for Chats

With Telegram Business or Premium, you can add colored labels to chats, giving them unique tags based on the chat folders they are in.

This helps you quickly differentiate between customers in your chat list based on their status, needs, or priority level.

All Telegram users can create custom chat folders to organize their chats – adding separate tabs to the chat list for Work, School, News and more.

Links to Chat

To make it even easier for customers to reach out, you can create links to chat with your business – like a button to reserve a table or track an order. When tapped, these links instantly open a chat with you and paste a suggested message for the user.

You can use these links both inside and outside of Telegram – from a link on your site to a QR code on a restaurant menu.

Each link shows how many times it was tapped so you can track its performance.

Chatbots for Business

Business users can connect Telegram bots that will process and answer messages on their behalf. This allows businesses to seamlessly integrate any existing tools and workflows, or add AI assistants that manage their chats.

When adding a chatbot, you can configure which chats the bot can access – such as excluding all chats with your contacts, or only responding to new chats.

This opens a new era for Telegram Bots – we welcome all developers to create new services that will help businesses automate and improve their communication with Telegram users. See our Bot Manuals for details.

Telegram will be introducing new features for businesses in the coming updates. For the moment, all Telegram Business features are available for free to Premium subscribers. You can find them in Settings > Telegram Business.

Supreme Court of Spain Suspends Order to Block Telegram

Today, the Supreme Court of Spain suspended its order to block Telegram in the country as it awaits a police report on the impact of the temporary ban on users.

Judge Santiago Pedraz instructed the national police to prepare a report on "the characteristics of Telegram, as well as the impact of the temporary suspension on its users." As a reminder, the order to block Telegram in Spain was issued on Friday, March 22.

New Telegram Bond Issued for $330 Million

Pavel Durov announced that last week Telegram had issued bonds worth $330 million to accelerate the development of the messenger. The applications for bonds placement were oversubscribed, and on top of this, the majority of the buyers consisted of high-tier, high priced funds.

Telegram has previously issued bonds on:

• March 2021: The first bond placement for $1 billion.
• April 2021: Bonds placed for an additional $750 million.
• July 2023: Bonds were issued for $270 million, about a quarter of which were purchased by Durov himself.

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.

Ability to share a folder

In the beta version of Telegram for Android, you can now share folder-based collections of your chats with other users.

Some Features:
• You can set several links for your folder with different sets of groups and channels that are included there initially.
• Private chats and bots cannot be shared.
• You can share access to a private group or channel with users only if you have administrator rights there with the ability to manage invitation links.
• You can only share folders that do not include chats by type (Contacts, Non-Contacts, Channels, Groups, Bots) and that do not contain excluded chats.

• If a folder author adds new groups or channels to the same collection that a user has used, that user will be prompted to join them.
• You can share a folder with others not only using a t.me/addlist link, but also via a QR code.
• Users without Telegram Premium can create links for only two folders, and with a subscription — for twenty folders. The limit also applies to the number of collections that you can add to your account.

Note:
• The application does not warn the user against accidentally adding a private group or channel to a collection.
• If the collection contains a simple group, then after creating a link to the folder, it is automatically converted into a supergroup with all the ensuing consequences.

Telegram fined €5.1M by Germany

Germany announced Monday that it is issuing fines of 5.125 million euros ($5 million) against the operators of the messaging app Telegram for failing to comply with German law. The Federal Office of Justice said Telegram FZ-LLC hasn't established a lawful way for reporting illegal content or named an entity in Germany to receive official communication. Both are required under German laws that regulate large online platforms.

German officials said they have repeatedly failed in their attempts to serve papers to Dubai-based Telegram, despite support from authorities in the United Arab Emirates. A Germany-based law firm has since declared that it represents Telegram, but this wasn't enough to prevent the fines being issued, the Federal Office of Justice said. German federal police warned earlier this year that the app is becoming a “medium for radicalization,” used by some to target politicians, scientists and doctors for their role in tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

“The operators of messaging services and social networks bear a particular responsibility for acting against incitement to hatred and violence on their platforms,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said in a statement. “These legal requirements and this responsibility can't be avoided by trying to be unreachable.” The fine can be appealed.

Telegram Web 3.0 Is Coming

Two test NFT collections of Telegram usernames have appeared on the Getgems website. Durov’s Code found that the mint of the first NFT-usenames started on 11 October. The first collection called “Telegram usernames” consists of 24 usernames, such as erevan.t.me and mmm.t.me. All of them are currently unavailable for purchase. We have only found 1 NFT username in the debug collection. The test buying and selling of Telegram usernames is provided by a wallet, which the TON Explorer service marks as a Telegram Team.

Messages on behalf of channels with Premium subscription

Users have reported that accounts without an active Premium subscription can no more comment on channel posts or send messages in groups on behalf of a channel. A close source to the Telegram development team talks about that decision this way:

“Since the introduction of this feature, it has been difficult to assess the scale of the scams made.

80% of the comments made and messages sent on behalf of channels were identified as spam. Previously, channel and group administrators suggested removing this feature entirely, but instead of that, we have limited it to those who have an active Premium subscription. Hopefully, this will reduce the spam operations that take advantage of this feature, without having to entirely drop the feature.”

Telegram is working on video stickers

An API Schema update revealed a mention on video stickers. Likely, users will be able to create stickers from regular raster videos. We can assume a video format with transparency support will be used. One of the most popular such formats is WebM. Currently all animated stickers are vector. To create your own animated stickers for Telegram, you need Adobe After Effects skills. Video stickers will make animated stickers easier to create, will allow to use camera footage or, for example, 3D animation.

Credit: @tginfo

Telegram Down: Several Users Reported Outage On Twitter, Issue Fixed

Several users reported facing issues with Telegram, the instant messaging platform. The issue began on January 17 2022 and lasted for a couple of hours. However, Telegram acknowledged the issue and fixed it soon. The outage was limited to certain regions around the world, including India. Users reported the Telegram outage on Down Detector as well. Keep reading to know more about the Telegram down the issue and when was is resolved on January 17, 2022.

According to Down Detector, users started facing issues with the instant messaging platform Telegram from 07:50 PM IST on January 17, 2022. Half an hour later, the number of reports peaked at 4,464 and then they declined by 12 AM midnight on January 18, 2022. As mentioned on the Down Detector website, about 45% of reports were about the application not functioning properly while another 36% were about server connection related problems. About 19% of users faced issues with the website as well. While these issues were reported at the Indian portal, the global Down Detector portal reports only 446 reports at the peak of the issue.

Telegram filed for enforcement of fines in the amount of $148.000

The bailiffs opened new cases against Telegram on the enforcement of fines, for a total of $148.000, because it refused to remove content prohibited in the Russian Federation. According to the data bank of the Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP), based on the decision of the Tagansky Court of Moscow dated December 20 2021, three enforcement proceedings were initiated against the company to collect $67.000, $27.000 and $54.000 in fines. As reported, in mid-December 2021, Telegram fully paid off the debt in fines for the amount of $200.000.

Source:@tginfo

Telegram fixed Reproducible Builds on Android

Earlier we reported that few latest versions of Telegram for Android couldn't be verified to be compiled from the official source code, since Reproducible Builds were broken by developers' mistake. Version 8.4.3 fixes reproducibility: we were able to verify that installation packages for Telegram for Android from telegram.org and Google Play use the source code published in the official repository. This means the Telegram developers didn't add any hidden functionality that would be missing in source code.

source:tginfo

Telegram works on message translation through its own servers

The new API schema data on the Telegram website indicates that in future versions of the messenger, translations will be made through the Telegram servers. In the current version of the application, translation on iOS is done via Apple Translator, and on Android — by direct requests to Google Translate. The language of the message is detected on-device. According to Durov's Code , Google Translate in Telegram for Android is used in a quirky way, with a workaround to not pay the service fee, as a temporary measure, while the messenger team is working on translation through their servers.

What technology will be used is still unknown. Language detection will most likely continue to be on-device.

source: @tginfo

A Fake Telegram Installer Is Distributing Harmful Purple Fox Malware On Computers

A new way to hack computer systems has been found. According to a report published by an anti-malware platform called Minerva Labs, fake Telegram messenger applications are being circulated on the internet to distribute the Purple Fox malware. When downloaded, the malware escapes the anti-virus system installed on a computer and can execute a transfer of information without the consent or knowledge of the user.

As mentioned in the report by Minerva Labs "We have often observed threat actors using legitimate software for dropping malicious files. This time however is different. This threat actor was able to leave most parts of the attack under the radar by separating the attack into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by AV engines, with the final stage leading to Purple Fox rootkit infection." The malicious Telegram installer is a compiled AutoIt script and is floating on the internet with the name "Telegram Desktop.exe" and hence, users are advised to beware.

Russian court fines Google, Telegram

A Moscow court on Monday ordered fresh fines for US tech giant Google and Russian-founded encrypted messaging service Telegram, accusing the companies of not removing illegal content. Telegram was fined four million rubles (49,440 euros) and Google two million rubles, the court's press service said on its Telegram channel. It did not disclose the exact nature of their offences.

Russia has piled fines on the world's biggest tech companies in recent months, with authorities accusing them of not moderating their content properly and interfering in the country's affairs. Facebook, Twitter, Google and other foreign tech giants have received fines of up to tens of millions of rubles in recent years. Telegram, was founded by Russian brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, who are based outside the country.

Telegram Reached 1 Billion Downloads

Wire is a cloud-based instant messaging and broadcasting service provided by the not-for-profit company Telegram LLC, a limited liability company based in Dubai, founded by a Russian entrepreneur. Pavel Durov Back in 2013, when its first version was released on the eve of 15 August of the same year.

Under Zuckerberg, What particularly affected WhatsApp, the most used instant messaging system in the world to date, was a real panacea for Durov, who took advantage of Palo Alto’s troubled times to grab new users. When WhatsApp stopped working for 6 very long hours in early October, in fact, almost the whole world started communicating via Telegram, this time (except for traditional SMS) able to connect with friends The only way to be (even if, a phone call would have been useful to everyone…)

And of course Durov and his ads quickly took advantage of the situation, saying, among other things, that Telegram is the safest messaging app to take refuge in when things aren’t going well elsewhere. Whether this is the case or not, the result has been what Telegram and its team of developers have always dreamed of: reaching one billion downloads and surpassing it! And so it was. At least with respect to the Android version, which according to the data released by Google Play Store, has entered the club of Big Downloaders.

Certainly nothing to do with the results achieved by Facebook and WhatsApp over the years, but certainly the Zuckerberg-owned social media giants benefited greatly from most of their years of experience and above all given the fact That they were born a few years ago. But Telegram deserves this success and continues to be: its journey over the years has been marred by continuous improvements and updates, which have made it one of the most popular applications especially by users, who use it extensively for work purposes. Very happy with the work of Telegram developer team.

Sponsored messages requirements in Telegram

A Russian channel called Durov's Code found out about upcoming requirements for sponsored messages in Telegram. The rules are going to be distinctively strict and are aimed to allow only high quality promotions.

Advertising requirements:

• Sponsored messages can contain only text.
• Maximum post length — 160 symbols.
• The post mustn't contain external links.
• Only a single post per channel which is going to be displayed at the bottom after reading all the recent posts of the channel.
• Moderation rules and requirements will be way more strict compared to other platforms.

Assigning a new owner of a group or channel when deleting the previous account

The Telegram Team Twitter account wrote about a new protocol that has been introduced into the messenger, responsible for the transfer of ownership rights over a channel or group chat. This process occurs if the account of their former owner was deleted.

Transfer of rights in channels

• Ownership is transferred to one of the administrators who has permission to publish messages.
• The presence of other rights increases the likelihood of transfer.
• If the administrator cannot publish messages, he won't be able to become the new owner of the channel.

Transfer of rights in groups

• The key factor is the right to add new administrators.
• The presence of other rights increases the chances for the property transfer.
• If there are no administrators left in the group, the participant who joined the chat before the others can become the owner.

The protocol also has nuances: the system may not transfer ownership for security reasons.

Credit: @tginfo