With an official post, Telegram has announced some news including the reaching of 400 million active users worldwide and the arrival by the end of 2020 of a feature that will allow group video calls.
Exceeding the milestone of 400 million users, the messaging service has more or less doubled its user base in two years, with a daily increase of at least 1.5 million units; a remarkable result, although still far from the main competitor WhatsApp, which last February exceeded 2 billion users.
To date, one of the main advantages of WhatsApp compared to Telegram is the ability to conveniently make video calls, a feature that has gained great popularity during the quarantine period imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Telegram’s technological delay on this front is undeniable- despite the fact that 7 years have already passed since its foundation, Telegram is one of the very few messaging services that still does not offer a video call feature, a gap that represents an evident competitive disadvantage towards all opponents.
Thanks to the social distancing and the lockdowns imposed by the new coronavirus on a large part of the world population, the company has become aware of this problem and in [year] things could finally change:
Video calls in [year] are what messaging was in 2013. There are safe or usable apps, but not both. We would like to solve the problem and focus on being able to implement a secure group video calling feature in [year].
The difficulty in creating a tool dedicated to video calls that guarantee not only ease of use but also security and privacy – always fundamental bases for Pavel Durov’s company – seems to be the real reason why Telegram does not yet have this today tool.
In the current context, the reference to the privacy issues that emerged recently for the popular Zoom video calling app is evident, which would seem to have been resolved with the recently released version 5.0.
In addition to these two innovations, in its official post, the company has also announced other innovations mostly related to improvements in existing features- quizzes improve, an initiative has been launched that is giving away 400 thousand euros for those who will develop an innovative test for educational purposes, the entire library of all stickers is now available and the interfaces of the apps for macOS and Android have been improved.