
Telegram has now 100M Monthly Active Users - mpgirro
https://telegram.org/blog/100-million
======
newscracker
It's really cool that Telegram is growing, even if it seems nowhere close to
WhatsApp or Facebook. I keep recommending Telegram to people I know, but
familiarity and the network effect keep most people on WhatsApp/FB.

My ultimate goal has been to move to Signal, but Signal being quite slow in
the development and the infrastructure fronts, it's not a viable option for
mass adoption right now.

For all its cryptographic weaknesses, I find Telegram to be a better choice.
Message delivery is super fast. It syncs messages across devices. It's
available on popular smartphone and tablet OSes and also on the major desktop
OSes. It's also available on the browser (need phone to activate it for use,
whereas in the other cases one single activation will hold good almost
forever). Telegram has been adding new features (some of them are probably
catch ups with WhatsApp) at a good pace.

My wishlist for Telegram is two fold - a) make the crypto better (or try to
work with Signal and adapt that) and b) introduce a monetization plan so I can
support the app financially for all the worth it has provided and keeps
providing.

~~~
pfg
_This._ Telegram got a lot of things right. They have clients that work well
on all platforms. Features like the Bot API and Channels have a lot of
potential. However, their home-grown crypto and dismissal of feedback from the
crypto community makes it hard for me to recommend it to anyone.

~~~
hatsunearu
The only thing that bothers me more than the homebrew crypto is their claims
of security. False sense of security is worse than no security.

~~~
alexandrerond
No one has cracked it, specially in the time they offered a $300.000 prize.

------
_jomo
Sadly, Telegram is barely what they claim. They're very good at marketing it
as an open and secure messenger, but it really is not.

Here is a brief summary:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639688)

I assume the HN folks are already aware of the crypto-wise downsides of
Telegram.

~~~
sz4kerto
I'm using it because it's really cross-platform, works reliably on Linux,
Windows Phone, web (these three are the most problematic when it comes to
messengers). Also, it's extremely lightweight and fast.

~~~
edcastro
It's one of the few - if not the only - native, reliable and fast among all
major platforms. It just works.

Sure, there's the whole security debacle behind, but all in all, as an instant
messenger, it works wonderfully.

------
mpinteractiv
I use it, I like it. It is simple, not riddled with ads/useless
functionalities whatever, I does 1 thing and does it well. How are they going
to monetize it ? I'm not sure though.

~~~
eps
> _monetize it_

The owner is a billionaire high-tech enterpreneur partial to the cypherpunk
ideas. He is basically doing it out of spite, to piss off the establishment.

~~~
ex3ndr
Paul was never billinaire. He got ~300M from selling vk.com. Spent ~100M in
first year. Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month and telegram is
48+ months old. So he already spent almost half of his money.

~~~
Mark222
> Spending on telegram's servers only is ~1M/month

Isn't that too much? I mean, setting aside if that's the precise number for
Telegram, isn't 1 million a month just for 100M users not impossible?

~~~
ex3ndr
Yes, we are always wondering how it is possible. But you need to understand
that telegram rolled not only their own crypto, but their own DB, PHP compiler
and so on. Everything is written in C++.

To solve one of the earliest DDOS attacks telegram's team take their servers
put it on the track and install them to other DC. This is insane.

~~~
sangnoir
> But you need to understand that telegram rolled not only their own crypto,
> but their own DB, PHP compiler and so on. Everything is written in C++

All of these sound like once-off items, and don't support/explain why it would
cost $1M+ a month

------
snowpanda
I'm using Actor these days, made by former Telegram developers.

Coming along very nice in my opinion :)

[https://actor.im](https://actor.im)

~~~
edwintorok
Would be nice to have a desktop client and pidgin integration, both of which
Telegram has (although the latter is an unofficial plugin).

~~~
ex3ndr
CEO of Actor Here!

Yes, we have desktop applications: [https://actorapp.ghost.io/desktop-apps-
updated/](https://actorapp.ghost.io/desktop-apps-updated/)

Sorry, we are not advertising it on our landing page, we are a small team and
not paying enough attention to marketing yet.

~~~
dingo_bat
Just a heads-up, the 'OPEN SOURCE' button in the right-top of
[https://actorapp.github.io/business/](https://actorapp.github.io/business/)
returns a 404.

------
SunShiranui
I think Telegram does really well on both functionality and UX, but is really
brought down by their closed-source policy. I'm not sure what the motivations
behind that are.

~~~
spoiler
The clients are all open source; the server isn't, but the last time I checked
they plan to opensource it as soon as they make sure there aren't any major
exploits someone could use against it. Which I know might sound silly, because
the open source community could find and patch those, but in light of all the
recent crypto-related security bugs lately, it makes you wonder if it is a
wise decision after all.

~~~
SunShiranui
I think that, when it comes to secure and private communications, you can't
really make any sort of claim in that direction if you're not open source.

------
amirmasoudabdol
I wonder how much of these are from Iran? I know that they are insanely
popular in Iran. If I wanna guess, I would say more than 10% if not 20%!

------
smarx007
I think this is great news. One thing that looks suspicious is 15 billion
messages a day. It must count group messages as a multiple of all subscribers
and maybe some other dirty tricks. Can't believe that an average user sends
150 messages a day.

~~~
ufukbay
Some people and sometimes I catch myself doing it send a sentence in multiple
messages since the message doesn't cost anything compared to a sms where you
would definitely try to fit as many characters as possible into a single
message.

However I'm not sure how common this is and if it could be one of the reasons
for the high amount of messages per user.

~~~
mcagl
Yeah, sometimes it is used more in an "IRC" way than in a "SMS on steroids"
way.

I think that the web and desktop clients just push this probability. Having a
computer keyboard instead of a phone to write triggers a different "state of
mind" in the user, I think. At least it's like that for me.

------
forinti
I moved to Telegram because Whatsapp doesn't allow robots. I have a robot that
sends me alerts from the database I manage (lag on the dataguard, tablespace
with less than 100MB free, etc). It is really useful.

~~~
potemkinhr
Do you have an example article or resource for such a use? I'd like to carry
over notifications to the IM instead of cluttering my e-mail needlessly.

~~~
forinti
I used this Perl template of a bot:
[https://www.snip2code.com/Snippet/655828/Basic-Telegram-
bot-...](https://www.snip2code.com/Snippet/655828/Basic-Telegram-bot-
implementation-using-)

And wrote down the steps I took to build a bot that sends pictures from an IP
camera (in Portuguese): [http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2016/02/solucao-
caseira-pa...](http://alquerubim.blogspot.com.br/2016/02/solucao-caseira-para-
seguranca-domestica.html)

------
StreamBright
I love Telegram, one suggestion though, if security is one of their priorities
than it would be good to have control over how one user is visible after
joining the network. I think right now you are just visible immediately after
joining to people who have you in the contacts by phone number.

------
dingo_bat
I like Telegram much better than the others because it's very fast, and having
a native Windows app is awesome. Much better than the crappy Whatsapp web
client which is not even an independent client.

The only problem is convincing people to migrate, and I have been highly
unsuccessful in that :(

~~~
collyw
Same problem here. I bought an Ubuntu phone, but everyone is on Whatsapp. Got
quite a few to convert, but I miss out on group messages started by others.

------
swah
I love Whatsapp, but group chat with family and friends replaced any need for
real live interaction, and its sad. I'd love to remove it, but sometimes its
really useful with the wife and parents.

------
obelisk_
Is telegram truly secure?

~~~
cpach
Previous discussions that might be of interest:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665541)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134262)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713190)

------
mightybyte
I used Telegram for awhile, but then suddenly started having problems with the
iPhone app. I can't remember what happened, message notifications didn't
appear, or maybe the app crashed, or something like that. Essentially it
became unusable, so I switched to Signal.

------
vegabook
I like Telegram because there's a native app for Ubuntu Phone.

~~~
reddotX
and a linux/Ubuntu desktop app

