The founder of Telegram, the Russian Pavel Durov, celebrated six months ago the entry into the list of applications with more downloads worldwide. It was the eighth.
“Thank you for loving us and telling your friends about Telegram,” Durov, 36, wrote on his channel on the messaging app itself. “With each new user, the power returns from businesses to people.”
He was also celebrating the fact that the Russian government, after banning – or attempting to ban – Telegram for two years, had waived the “ineffective ban,” as the AP reported.
The app hasn’t left the list and in January of this year, according to SensorTower, which is increasing downloads from Apple and Google stores, it took the lead.
What drove Telegram’s growth in 2020 was the pandemic, but not only. WhatsApp had abandoned accounts for various reasons, including in Brazil, right and left, leading to the search for an alternative considered safer.
In early January, WhatsApp announced to users that it would start sharing some of its data with Facebook; days later, Trump was banned by Facebook and other US platforms.
It was then that he triggered what Durov ironically described as “the greatest digital migration in human history,” adding that 94% of new users were from outside the United States.
In the usual tone, he commented: “People no longer want to trade their privacy for a free service, they no longer want to be held hostage by monopolies who seem to think they can get away with anything. what”.
But perhaps Telegram isn’t the biggest achievement – or endurance – among global apps.
Throughout the year, Donald Trump has done everything to ban TikTok from the United States or remove it from the hands of Chinese Zhang Yiming, 37. and continues to follow the Telegram in January.
It was banned in India, perhaps the main effect of the ex-president’s efforts, and is now an Indian clone of TikTok, TakaTak, which sits eighth on the list.
ALSO VACCINES
Closing of the week, at the top of the New York Times homepage, “Vaccines from China and Russia are working. Why not use them? ”, Article written by two public health research activists, India and Malaysia.
They write that the solution to the vaccine shortage, including in Europe, lies in China, Russia “and soon, perhaps, India”. They question the veto on Pfizer and Moderna’s production outside rich countries – and the fact that they’ve reserved almost everything.
Above all, they demand from the World Health Organization the approval of Chinese and Russian vaccines, which have opened a procedure before and have gone to the end.
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