As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the world, many more people are turning to the internet to stay connected and Telegram has just seen its app get up to 500 million downloads on Google Play store.
Telegram recently updated its Android software to the 6.0.1 version. The cloud-based instant messaging and voice over IP service had launched in 2013.
As of now, Telegram apps are available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, macOS and Linux. While this is a massive achievement for the social networking company, it seemingly pales in contrast to competitors.
For example, WhatsApp has reached a total of five billion downloads and Google’s Messages has attained one billion downloads.
Yet, it is worth considering that unlike these two, Telegram does not come pre-installed on Android smartphones, thus its 500 million downloads is a big win.
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In recent years, Telegram has released an end-to-end security feature that offers users a chance to send and receive ‘secret messages’ that even the company cannot access. While this feature is notably not provided for group messaging, it still gives a level of privacy.
Also, in April 2020, Telegram revealed that it was working on a video calling feature. Likely, the feature is to compete with other video calling platforms that are currently dominating the market.
However, there is no news about when the firm expects the feature to be ready. It is possible that Telegram will want to push it out during this pandemic to take advantage of the surge in video calls during this period.
The only thing the company has said is that the video call feature will have better security than those of current video calling platforms. Likely, it will want to prevent the kind of security and privacy issues Zoom currently face.
Like Telegram, many social networking companies are seeing rise in downloads and number of users. But their ads revenue suffer as companies are trying to cut costs.
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