Instant messaging has definitely offered tough and serious competition to the traditional SMS model, and in the realm of instant messaging apps itself, the rivalry is fierce. When WhatsApp suffered from an outage in February this year, another service known as Telegram actually gained a few million users along the way. Well, Telegram now has 35 million members, where 15 million of them happen to be active members who make use of Telegram on a daily basis. In fact, in the past 30 days alone, the Telegram app has received a whopping 8 billion messages.
This is definitely a huge increase in terms of usage for Telegram. If one were to rewind the clock back to October last year, there were just 100,000 active daily members, which means we are looking at an astonishing 14,900% increase in a matter of just 5 months. Apart from the WhatsApp outage, there was also the matter of WhatsApp being picked up by Facebook for $19 billion which did cause some users to look for another alternative, too.
Telegram is available for iOS and Android platforms, where you are able to conduct group chats with up to 200 members, not to mention being able to share up to 1GB worth of video. The implementation of Secret Chats is another winning hand fro Telegram, as it relies on end-to end encryption so that only the sender and the recipient are able to read it, with the added safety of all messages not being kept on Telegram’s servers.