Telegram, an alternative to WhatsApp

Telegram is a cross-platform instant messaging app that appeared a few months ago and has grown dramatically to get more than a million of downloads on the Google Play.

The Durov brothers created Telegram with the idea to make an application as safe and efficient as possible. They were the creators of VKontakte, the largest social network in Europe after Facebook and the second most visited website in Russia. After the huge commercial success of VKontakte, they decided to launch Telegram completely nonprofit, ensuring that it will remain free and with no ads.

The main advantage it offers over Whatsapp, his greatest rival, is the secure transmission of messages and the multiplatform support. Telegram provides the option to encrypt messages if we select “Start Secret Chat” with a friend. In this case, a new encrypted window opens and data are encrypted on the server until we decide to self-destruct them.

The self-destruction of messages is a configurable parameter. We can choose the time interval between the moment we send a message and it destroys itself, ranging between a week and 2 seconds. You can also know at any time if the other person has received the messages through the tick system Telegram uses, similar to Whatsapp, but with the notification of read message instead of delivered.

Other interesting options include cross-platform support, thanks to its fully open source, which means that there are official versions for Android and iOS and even unofficial versions for PC, Mac and Linux.

Telegram allows the formation of groups up to 100 people and you can send images and videos up to 1GB, with unlimited storage capacity in the cloud. Currently it already have English and Spanish versions, and the only negative point so far is that it doesn’t offer the possibility to send audio files yet.

You can download Telegram from the Google Play and the App Store.