Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time — your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers.

With Telegram, you can send messages, photos, videos and files of any type (doc, zip, mp3, etc), as well as create groups for up to 200,000 people or channels for broadcasting to unlimited audiences. You can write to your phone contacts and find people by their usernames. As a result, Telegram is like SMS and email combined — and can take care of all your personal or business messaging needs. In addition to this, we support end-to-end encrypted voice calls.

Telegram is for everyone who wants fast and reliable messaging and calls. Business users and small teams may like the large groups, usernames, desktop apps and powerful file sharing options.

Since Telegram groups can have up to 200,000 members, they support replies, mentions and hashtags that help maintain order and keep communication in large communities efficient. You can appoint admins with advanced tools to help these communities prosper in peace. Public groups can be joined by anyone and are powerful platforms for discussions and collecting feedback.

In case you’re more into pictures, Telegram has animated gif search, a state of the art photo editor, and an open sticker platform (find some cool stickers here or here). What’s more, there is no need to worry about disk space on your device. With Telegram’s cloud support and cache management options, Telegram can take up nearly zero space on your phone.

Those looking for extra privacy should check out their advanced settings and rather revolutionary policy. And if you want secrecy, try their device-specific Secret Chats with self-destructing messages, photos, and videos — and lock your app with an additional passcode.

Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram is a cloud-based messenger with seamless sync. As a result, you can access your messages from several devices at once, including tablets and computers, and share an unlimited number of photos, videos and files (doc, zip, mp3, etc.) of up to 2 GB each. And if you don’t want to store all that data on your device, you can always keep it in the cloud.

Thanks to their multi-data center infrastructure and encryption, Telegram is faster and way more secure. On top of that, private messaging on Telegram is free and will stay free — no ads, no subscription fees, forever.

The Telegram API is open, and they welcome developers to create their own Telegram apps. They also have a Bot API, a platform for developers that allows anyone to easily build specialized tools for Telegram, integrate any services, and even accept payments from users around the world.

You can use Telegram on smartphones, tablets, and even computers. There are apps for iOS (9.0 and above), Android (4.1 and up) and Windows Phone. You can also use Telegram’s web version or install one of the desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

No. See this post for details.

Founder and CEO Pavel Durov, who financed Telegram throughout most of its history, has outlined a strategy to make Telegram sustainable in this post.

While Telegram will introduce monetization in 2021 to pay for the infrastructure and developer salaries, making profits will never be an end-goal for them.

Big internet companies like Facebook or Google have effectively hijacked the privacy discourse in the recent years. Their marketers managed to convince the public that the most important things about privacy are superficial tools that allow hiding your public posts from the people around you. Adding these superficial tools enables companies to calm down the public and change nothing in how they are turning over private data to marketers and other third parties.

Telegram thinks that the two most important components of Internet privacy should be instead:

1. Protecting your private conversations from snooping third parties, such as officials, employers, etc.
2. Protecting your personal data from third parties, such as marketers, advertisers, etc.

This is what everybody should care about, and these are some of their top priorities. Telegram’s aim is to create a truly free messenger, without the usual caveats. This means that instead of diverting public attention with low-impact settings, they can afford to focus on the real privacy issues that exist in the modern world.

Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which Telegram doesn’t have any data to disclose.

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force Telegram to give up any data.

Thanks to this structure, Telegram can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people’s privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.

To this day, Telegram has disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

The Telegram development team is based in Dubai.

Most of the developers behind Telegram originally come from St. Petersburg, but had to leave Russia due to local IT regulations. Telegram has tried a number of locations as its base, including Berlin, London and Singapore. They’re currently happy with Dubai, although they are ready to relocate again if local regulations change.