Telegram is a fantastic messaging app and we have talked about its best features before and I prefer it to Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger. However, it doesn’t have the same number of monthly active users as the other major chatting platforms, less than 10 % in fact (62 million MAU’s). But this relatively small user base is quite chatty and Telegram’s co-founder, Pavel Durov, revealed to TechCrunch that 12 billion messages are sent daily on the platform.
Back in August, Telegram users were sending 10 billion messages so an increase by 2 billion messages per day in a month is quite commendable for a messaging platform that is only two years old. Jan Koum announced in January that the 700 million Whatsapp users at the time sent 30 billion messages per day so by direct comparison, Telegram users are more active than Whatsapp users.
Pavel Durov also commented about the current use of Telegram “Interesting thing that we noticed is that people who installed Telegram, started to use Telegram as their primary messaging application. And that’s why we see this huge increase in user activity” This is a clear indication that people are switching to Telegram and they love it according to Durov.
Durov was also critical about Whatsapp in two areas: Security and the cloud. As you know, chats on Whatsapp are saved locally on your phone and don’t have cross device sync. You can’t also send large files to each other and all this limitations were highlighted by Durov. He also pointed out on the privacy concerns that plague Whatsapp where he talked about a case in Russia where messages were intercepted and decrypted by the police. There is some truth in this as Telegram is quite secure and this is backed by a report that shows it is more secure than Whatsapp, especially secret chat.
Telegram is growing and it may gain even more users thanks to Samsung’s move of developing a messenger based on its open source platform and it will be only a matter of time they reach the 100 million monthly users milestone.
