Telegram is the latest messaging app to get a major new feature, but unlike Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Hike and countless others, it isn’t cribbing..
Telegram is the latest messaging app to get a major new feature, but unlike Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Hike and countless others, it isn’t cribbing from Snapchat. That’s because Telegram is introducing voice calls.
Admittedly the company is a little late to the audio calling party, but that is likely because of its focus on security, and in particular end-to-end encryption, which Telegram said also extents to cover audio calls.
Telegram was founded by Pavel Durov, a Russian entrepreneur who rose to fame as the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook. Since being ousted as CEO in 2014, he has lived a nomadic existence and focused his work on developing Telegram, which gained global attention as an alternative to WhatsApp after it was acquired by Facebook in 2014. WhatsApp now has over one billion users, making it the most popular chat app on the planet — when we last heard from Telegram in February 2016 , it had clocked an lower (but nonetheless) impressive 100 million monthly users with 350,000 new users joining per day.
Those users will soon gain access to Telegram Calls, which the company said is rolling out to those in Europe first before coming to the rest of the world soon after.
