NEW DELHI: Popular messaging platform WhatsApp has started blocking links to rival app Telegram , in a move that has already started earning it criticism.First brought to light by a Reddit thread, this issue is limited to only WhatsApp on Android. Therefore, links to Telegram app sent from an Android phone to an iPhone open on the latter, but not the former.When users send a telegram.me or telegram.org link from WhatsApp, it appears only as text and not as a clickable link. On the other hand, links to the news website The Telegram (thetelegram.com) are opening as expected on WhatsApp chats.According to a report by The Verge, a Telegram employee that this issue is due to a update pushed out by WhatsApp yesterday that disabled links to the rival app.Telegram, which is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Ubuntu Touch, Windows, OS X and Linux platforms, claims to have over 62 million monthly active users (May 2015). On the other hand, WhatsApp’s user base across Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian, Tizen and Firefox OS platforms is over 900 million.