The Clash between Telegram and WhatsApp: Accusations and Realities

The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has criticized WhatsApp, claiming it has copied numerous features and published a timeline of their introduction on his X page.

"Few WhatsApp users realize that they are using a copy. Over 80% of its features were replicated from Telegram – years ago" – wrote Durov.

In his post, Durov mentions capabilities like channel creation, editing sent messages, polls, self-destructing messages, link previews, and even a dark mode. In response, some commentators pointed out that certain features, such as voice calls, appeared in WhatsApp earlier, not to mention the end-to-end encryption for messages that still doesn't work by default in Telegram.

This is not the first time Pavel Durov has accused WhatsApp of copying Telegram's features; he has been making such claims since 2014. Although Durov's own projects are hard to label as original since he completely copied the idea and design of Facebook for his social network "VKontakte," he launched Telegram in 2013 only four years after WhatsApp was founded by American entrepreneur of Ukrainian descent Jan Koum in 2009, which was later bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014 (now Meta).

In a comment to an unnamed Russian magazine in August 2013, later quoted by Wired, Koum stated: "Pavel Durov can only copy great products like Facebook and WhatsApp; he has never had and will never have original ideas."

In 2018, Koum left Facebook due to disagreements over user data privacy and is currently not involved in WhatsApp's development.

Nonetheless, WhatsApp remains the most popular messaging app in the world, with over 3 billion active users monthly, according to recent data from Meta. According to Durov, as of March 2025, Telegram had more than 1 billion active users monthly.