Within the last 30 days, Telegram was used by 200,000,000 people. This is an insane number by any standards. If Telegram were a country, it would have been the sixth largest country in the world.

We owe reaching this milestone to you alone – our users. We have never promoted Telegram with ads, so all these 200 million people are on Telegram because you invited them to join.

This is why you – our users – have been and will always be our only priority. Unlike other popular apps, Telegram doesn’t have shareholders or advertisers to report to. We don’t do deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies. Since the day we launched in August 2013 we haven’t disclosed a single byte of our users' private data to third parties.

We operate this way because we don’t regard Telegram as an organization or an app. For us, Telegram is an idea; it is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.

Above all, we at Telegram believe in people. We believe that humans are inherently intelligent and benevolent beings that deserve to be trusted; trusted with freedom to share their thoughts, freedom to communicate privately, freedom to create tools. This philosophy defines everything we do.

This was the reason why Telegram became the first messaging app to roll out end-to-end encryption to tens of millions of users in 2013. This was also the reason why Telegram became the first mainstream messaging app to fully open source its client code, and why Telegram became the first popular messenger to provide 100% open APIs for third party app and bot developers.

Over the years, our unconditional trust in people allowed us to do things other apps were hesitant to implement; things such as support for insanely large group chats, unlimited broadcast channels and a free user-generated sticker platform. In all these cases, our belief in people yielded extraordinary results, and users put these tools to great use.

What inspires us most is that, judging by the rapid growth of Telegram’s popularity, this belief might be mutual. While we unconditionally believe in people, it turns out 200,000,000 humans also believe in us.

Thank you for this – we will always have your back.









March 22, 2018,

Pavel Durov