Telegram perhaps one of the few known messaging apps in Uganda is on a growth spiral. Within the last 30 days, Telegram was used by 200 million people. This is an insane number by any standards. To put in context, if Telegram were a country, it would have been the sixth largest country in the world.
The company has never promoted Telegram with ads, so all these 200 million people are on Telegram because of word of mouth among its users.
Unlike other popular apps, Telegram doesn’t have shareholders or advertisers to report to. They don’t do deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies. Since the day they launched in August 2013 they haven’t disclosed a single byte of their users’ private data to third parties the company claims in a blog post.
They operate this way because they don’t regard Telegram as an organization or an app. For them, 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.
The company claims what keeps them going is based on, judging by the rapid growth of Telegram’s popularity, this belief might be mutual.
