Telegram Launches on App Store on This Day in 2013

On this day, Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov released Telegram on Apple’s App Store. The Android version followed on October 20, 2013.

The idea of a secure messenger dated back to 2011. At the time, the Durov brothers were behind VKontakte, Russia’s largest homegrown social network and the country’s rough equivalent of Facebook.

Russian authorities demanded that VKontakte remove opposition communities and media pages from the platform. At the time, VKontakte still had a relatively independent approach to moderation, and Durov’s team refused to take them down.

Pressure from the Russian authorities continued to grow. Pavel Durov eventually sold his stake in VKontakte, lost control of the company, left Russia, and turned his full attention to Telegram.

How Telegram Was Built

Nikolai Durov developed the MTProto protocol, while Pavel financed the project and shaped its product philosophy.

In his early interviews about Telegram, Pavel Durov repeatedly emphasized three things: speed, security, and independence.

Telegram intended to earn users’ trust not merely through promises, but through an open API, a published protocol specification, and client applications whose source code could be inspected.

Telegram’s original principles can roughly be summarized as four things: privacy, freedom, speed, and independence.

Its obvious main competitor was WhatsApp, which was already becoming the dominant global messenger. Telegram immediately tried to differentiate itself technically.

In October 2013, it introduced Secret Chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destructing messages. Its API and MTProto specification were made public, while the official client applications were released as open source. In January 2014, Telegram already allowed users to send files of almost any type up to 1.5 GB — an unusually generous limit for a messenger at the time.

The Growth of Telegram

Most messengers of the mid-2010s were essentially trying to replace SMS: open the app → find someone by their phone number → send them a message.

Telegram quickly moved toward a different idea: the messenger as a platform.

It introduced large groups, public channels, bots, huge file transfers, cloud-based message history, simultaneous access from multiple devices, and usernames that allowed people to communicate without necessarily revealing their phone numbers.

Telegram aggressively introduced features that now feel perfectly normal in messaging apps: voice messages, large groups, channels, bots, usernames, message editing, deleting messages for both participants, cloud synchronization, a full desktop client, video messages, polls, and much more.

By 2018, Telegram had reached 200 million monthly active users. At the time, the company emphasized that it had never paid to advertise itself to acquire users and did not have a traditional corporate structure with outside shareholders to satisfy.

In 2019, Telegram pushed the idea of user control over conversations even further: it allowed users to delete any message in a private conversation for both participants, with no time limit.

Telegram’s language at the time captured its philosophy well: the company stressed that it did not use people’s private data to target advertising.

By 2020, Telegram had reached 400 million monthly active users.

The Battle With Russia

Because of Telegram’s origins, Russia has always been a particularly complicated market for the messenger.

For several years, Telegram resisted demands from Russian authorities for access to user information and encryption-related data. The conflict escalated after Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB — the principal successor to the Soviet KGB’s domestic security functions — demanded information necessary to decrypt messages.

Telegram refused.

In 2018, a Russian court ordered Telegram blocked nationwide.

Telegram did not simply accept the ban. The service began switching IP addresses and using infrastructure belonging to major cloud providers, making conventional IP filtering much harder.

Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, responded by blocking huge ranges of IP addresses, including infrastructure associated with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

As a result, millions of IP addresses were affected, and completely unrelated websites and online services using the same cloud infrastructure experienced outages.

Yet Russia never managed to completely stop Telegram. Users also relied on VPNs and proxies to bypass the restrictions.

In 2020, Roskomnadzor effectively gave up and officially lifted the ban. Telegram once again became accessible in Russia without the restrictions imposed under the 2018 blocking order.

The relationship did not suddenly become simple, however.

In September 2021, immediately before elections to Russian Parliament, Telegram blocked a bot associated with Smart Voting — a tactical voting project created by Alexei Navalny’s Team. By 2021, it had become one of the Russian opposition’s most important projects.

This time, Telegram complied with restrictions affecting a major Russian opposition resource. Durov explained the decision by citing Russian election law and restrictions on campaigning during voting.

It was not the last controversial moderation decision involving Russian political activism.

In 2023, Telegram placed a “FAKE” warning on the main channel of The Way Home (Путь домой), a grassroots movement led largely by wives and relatives of Russian soldiers mobilized for the war in Ukraine. The movement demanded that mobilized soldiers be allowed to return home from Ukraine.

In August 2025, Russian authorities again began restricting Telegram, initially targeting voice and video calls. By 2026, the restrictions had expanded into broader throttling of the service.

By then, however, restrictions on global internet platforms were hardly unusual in Russia. Facebook Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube had been blocked.

Telegram’s position remained unusual: despite years of conflict with the state, it had become one of the most important communication and media platforms in Russia — used by ordinary people, independent media and opposition figures, but also by government agencies, politicians, state media, and pro-government military bloggers.

Who Paid for All of This?

For its first years, Telegram was financed primarily by Pavel Durov.

That allowed the company to make a compelling promise: we don’t have advertisers whose business depends on selling your attention.

But with hundreds of millions of users, such a model could not continue forever.

Telegram eventually chose an interesting compromise.

In 2021, Sponsored Messages appeared, but advertising was initially limited to large public channels and designed without the conventional behavioral profiling used by companies such as Meta and Google.

In 2022, Telegram Premium was introduced.

Monetization subsequently expanded to include Telegram Stars, Gifts, Mini Apps, Telegram Business, advertising, Premium subscriptions, and other services.

Eventually, the model worked.

According to Durov, Telegram became profitable for the first time in 2024, with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion and Telegram Premium surpassing 12 million subscribers.

This was an important milestone for the company. At least so far, Telegram has demonstrated that a consumer service with an audience of more than a billion people can survive without being acquired by Meta, Google, or another technology giant.

Conflicts and Blocking Around the World

Russia was far from the only government to clash with Telegram.

One of the most serious confrontations occurred in France in 2024, although it is often oversimplified as a dispute over giving the French government access to private chats.

On August 24, 2024, Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris and spent about four days in custody.

Telegram’s approach to privacy, moderation, and cooperation with governments has repeatedly put it into conflict with countries with very different political systems.

At various points, Telegram has been blocked, restricted, or temporarily disrupted in countries including:

China — blocked nationwide
Iran — blocked nationwide
Pakistan — blocked or restricted at various times
Indonesia — temporarily restricted
Afghanistan — temporarily restricted
Thailand — authorities attempted to restrict it during anti-government protests
Azerbaijan — temporarily restricted during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war
Cuba — restricted during periods of political unrest
Brazil — temporarily blocked following disputes with the courts
Iraq — temporarily blocked
North Korea — ordinary citizens have virtually no access to the global internet in the first place
Russia — blocked nationwide, ordinary citizens will loose access to the global internet soon.