Telegram delivers 1 billion messages per day

The open source chat app Telegram, from the founders of the Russian social networking site VK, now delivers 1 billion messages a day to users. The number of active users amounts to fifty million; which is much less than WhatsApp.

In addition, the free chat app – which, in its own words, does not aim to make money – will receive a million new users every week, the organization claims. Although it is not clear what Telegram means by ‘active users’, it is certain that Telegram is considerably smaller than its paid competitor WhatsApp: that chat app. had in October six hundred million monthly active users.

The number of messages that WhatsApp processes is also considerably higher. Telegram delivers a billion messages every day; at WhatsApp goods that in April there were 44 billion. Due to the existence of group conversations, these numbers are somewhat misleading: after all, if a message is sent to a group chat with five people, it will be delivered five times. Moreover, unlike WhatsApp, Telegram has support for using multiple clients side by side; therefore, a message can be delivered to a computer as well as to a telephone.

Telegram recently added some new features, such as transferring a Telegram account to a new number. There is also support for perfect forward secrecy. Temporary keys are used for this. If the key is obtained in the future, only recent traffic can be decrypted as a result: past traffic has used a different key, which has already been deleted. Users can also send others a link to reach them on Telegram by adding their username to the address ‘telegram.me/’, and the Android version has been given a Material Design appearance.