Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, has accused WhatsApp of replicating many of its features. He shared a timeline of the emergence of these capabilities on his X page.
"Few WhatsApp users realize they are using a copy. Over 80% of its features were borrowed from Telegram years ago," Durov wrote.
In his post, he mentioned features like channel creation, message editing, polls, auto-delete, link previews, and even a dark mode. In response, commenters pointed out that some features, such as voice calls, appeared in WhatsApp earlier, not to mention the end-to-end encryption that is still not enabled by default in Telegram.
This is not the first time Durov has accused WhatsApp of copying functions, a claim he has been making since 2014. While his own projects are also hard to label as original, he fully copied the idea and design of Facebook for his social network "VKontakte", and launched Telegram in 2013, four years after WhatsApp, which was created by Ukrainian-born entrepreneur Jan Koum in 2009 and later acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.
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 regarding user data privacy and currently has no involvement in WhatsApp's development.
Yet, WhatsApp remains the world's most popular messaging app, with over 3 billion active users monthly, according to the latest Meta data. Durov claims that as of March 2025, Telegram had over 1 billion active users monthly.
