Telegram now boasts of 700 million active users, inching closer to the 1 billion club enjoyed by other popular social apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, its main rival in the messenger space.
“Telegram became one of the top-5 downloaded apps worldwide in 2022 and now has over 700 million monthly active users. This growth is solely from personal recommendations – Telegram has never paid to advertise its apps,” a statement on the company’s blog says.
The announcement was made alongside the official announcement of Telegram Premium which brings lots of new features to the standard Telegram experience at a fee of almost Kshs 600 (USD 4.99) per month – at current forex rates.
The new features in Telegram Premium include the doubling of various app-based chat features like the bumping up of file upload limits to 4GB, making it possible for subscribers to upload and circulate large files on their channels, individual chats as well as in groups. There is also the promise of faster speeds when downloading files and accessing multimedia content in the app as well as special stickers, unique reactions and animated profile pictures in addition to markers indicating the special status of users to others.
Telegram has, over the years, benefitted immensely from its feature-rich portfolio which offers users a lot more than the competition has been doing. WhatsApp, for instance, just allowed its over 2 billion users the ability to upload and share large files up to 2 gigabytes the other day when Telegram has had the option for years. The platform also only recently let its group feature allow up to 512 members when Telegram allows up to 200,000 members in a group.
Telegram has also benefitted greatly from the numerous issues WhatsApp has run into over the years starting with its controversial sale to Facebook 8 years to the numerous privacy concerns as well as various outages.
