Prevention is better than treatment. This saying applies not only to medicine, but at least in Iran, to cyberspace as well. Thus the country’s prosecutor general has issued a letter to the Minister of Communications ordering the blocking of the very popular Viber, Tango, and WhatsApp applications in Iran within the next month. This has left Iranian users (as well as their friends and family members abroad) very worried about their means of communication and, as usual, put them in the search of a new replacement. There is still no native Iranian counterpart to these applications, and in any case, for now at least, Iranian users place more trust on these foreign services. In the past few days since the letter from the judiciary was issued, there has been a mass migration of Iranians users to the messaging application Telegram.
Telegram is a cross platform messenger with a focus on security and privacy. It allows users to exchange messages, photos, videos, and files that are encrypted and self-destructing. The app is officially available for Android and iOS, and has unofficial clients for the Windows Phone, Windows desktop, and Linux available from independent developers. As of March 2014,Telegram had 35 million monthly users and over 15 million daily active users around the world.
What makes Telegram stand out compared to its rivals is its focus on security. The company actually held a competition that would award any hacker that could intercept its traffic with 200,000 Bitcoins (they claim no one succeeded). Telegram says that even its managers cannot access user information and that every message sent is deleted off its servers after a set period of time.
Downloads of the application have skyrocketed among Iranian users in the past week. Popular local tech websites are putting out article after article introducing the software. For now, it seems that Iranian consumers have made their decision. Until a popular indigenous alternative is developed for popular foreign messaging services (or there is a significant shift in government policy) it seems that such mass migrations will increasingly be the norm in Iran.
Source: IranTech
