Telegram founder Pavel Durov accused WhatsApp of copying features, posting on his X page the chronology of their appearance in these two messengers.
"Few WhatsApp users realize they’re using a copycat. Over 80% of its features were copied from Telegram — years later," Durov wrote.
In his post, Durov mentions the ability to create channels, edit sent messages, polls, auto-delete, link previews, and even a dark theme. In response, commenters mentioned that some features, like voice calls, appeared in WhatsApp earlier, not to mention end-to-end message encryption, which still doesn’t work by default in Telegram.
This is not the first time that Pavel Durov has accused WhatsApp of copying Telegram's features; he has periodically made such statements since 2014. Although Durov's projects themselves are hardly original, he completely copied the idea and design of Facebook on his social network Vkontakte, and when he lost control of it, he launched Telegram in 2013. This happened only four years after the launch of WhatsApp, which was created by Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Jan Koum in 2009 and later bought by Facebook (now Meta) for $19 billion in 2014.
In a comment to an unnamed Russian magazine in August 2013, later quoted by Wired, Koum said: "Pavel Durov only knows how to 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 the approach to user data privacy, and he is currently not involved in the development of WhatsApp.
However, WhatsApp remains the most popular messenger in the world, with over 3 billion monthly active users, according to the latest data from Meta. According to Durov, Telegram had over 1 billion monthly active users as of March 2025.