As much as I'd love to get rid of SMS and email, there's no way Russia isn't collecting and processing all of the information in this app.

I would be surprised if they banned Telegram.

It's basically a frontend to VK with functionality like that of Telegram.

Funny how much you can do if you do it slowly. Say, if 10 years ago someone would say all of Russia is moving to the only state-approved IM which is the same as VK, I think there'd be riots, LOL, even in Russia, LOL, it'd be like blocking all porn.

Since TG is most likely compromised, I think this won't be a significant change really.

Not being able to use WA for voice calls would suck though.

Back to IRC for them.

Pavel Durov had to flee Russia after resisting Putin's influence on VK. That's public information known to everyone who cares to spend a minute reading his Wikipedia article.

Why don't they just adopt WeChat /s

I hope this garbage fails and gets hacked. Not using it even with a gun pointed at my head. Russian "kulibins" can't innovate, all they do is create broken garbage.

That's what he says.

Ukrainian special services, on the other hand, point out servers and most Telegram employees residing in St. Petersburg and claim that he made few dozen visits to Russia since his alleged flight from there.

Not using it even with a gun pointed at my head.

Why? You can use it to send messages to random numbers till the gun is pointed elsewhere.

The world isn't that simple. It's possible that things could have changed since the regime formally took over VK.

Durov is full of shit

Pavel Durov Has Visited Russia More Than 50 Times Since His “Exile” in 2014

He was in Russia when he was being sued by the FSB and on the day the Kremlin publicly dropped its claims against Telegram

(istories.media)

Russian IT is pretty solid. It shows in the banking sector and in digital government services.

Having government apps on my phone physically makes me ill, it feels like I have worms in my butt. I can't describe it with other words. I hate my government with passion.

Probably gonna have to buy a burner phone though, and do what you said. Seems like there is no escaping it...

I quite literally live in Russia and have experienced the horrors of it. It is far, far from "pretty solid". The only solid thing they got is blocking everything their gaze falls upon. I can't even access cratesio anymore without a VPN. Hell, I can't access the majority of the internet anymore. My system won't update, I can't download libraries, nothing. The router that my isp gave me doesn't allow for passwords longer than 8 characters and crashes if it's longer than that. It is advertised as "made in Russia". Vk - don't even get me started. It won't even open with connection under 10mbit/s. It will lag, try to load of minutes, and in the end won't do a thing while hogging the battery. It alone straight up makes my desktop browser use 100% CPU and a few gigs of ram. I would continue, if I had a better memory, but living in this country literally kills my brain with stress.

Telegram isn't banned in Ukraine. Can't be that bad.