14 DAY TRIAL // Telegram is often considered one of the best alternatives to WhatsApp, and the whole thing gained even more traction a few weeks ago when the Facebook-owned company experienced a massive outage that knocked its services offline, remaining unavailable for hours.
And this obviously has pushed more and more users to alternatives, including Telegram, whose adoption skyrocketed once again.
And as it turns out, the whole thing helped Telegram get past the 1 billion downloads milestone in the Google Play Store, as observed by Android Police.
Durov: 70 million new accounts in a few hours
The achievement isn’t necessarily surprising. Telegram founder Pavel Durov himself said after the WhatsApp outage that no less than 70 million new accounts were created in a few hours.
“The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day. I am proud of how our team handled the unprecedented growth because Telegram continued to work flawlessly for the vast majority of our users. That said, some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speed than usual as millions of users from these continents rushed to sign up for Telegram at the same time,” Durov said.
Needless to say, the actual download count for Telegram on Android could be substantially higher, as the aforementioned figure only includes the installs make from the Google Play store.
Many people install the app using the dedicated APK file, as well as other stores, so at the end of the day, Telegram might be running on even more Android devices.
And of course, there’s also the iPhone base where Telegram is currently installed, though this time, no actual figures in this regard are available given Apple doesn’t share such information.