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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

The USA, especially in the area of financial regulations has a very, very long reach.

I agree. Basically if you use US Dollars then US regulators consider you under their jurisdiction, because they can stop you from using US Dollars by limiting other entities (banks, payment processors) dealings with you.

Telegram as a corporation seems very determined to evade that reach, and appears to have the resources to pull it off.

Exactly this. Given how they have evaded Russia for a long time now, Murica must have something else in their assets to exert control over them.

Basically to evade American reach, you need to have support from Russia and/or China. If you don't have that support, you are going to have a very hard time.

And Russia and China are hardly the type of countries who are keen to support a secure messaging platform.

Let's not pretend the United States government supports them either.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/the-broken-recor...

How about we not pretend that Russia, China, and the US are playing the same game either?

Which, FWIW is exactly why Telegram doesn’t even try to be a secure messaging platform.

https://m.habr.com/en/post/206900/

It seems to me that the US gov’t wouldn’t have a hard time getting Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store. That seems like a pretty awful scenario for them.

Not really, Telegram works as a web app and also, not that many people in the world actually use iPhones (at least outside of the US. In the US though, more people use iPhone than Android it seems)

1+ billion iPhones are in use worldwide with more people having them in China than the US.

And the idea that people are going to simply switch from an iOS app to a web app is pretty laughable. Mobile web apps are by and large terrible experiences.

Everything I can find on it, seems that Apple and iOS has around 10-25% market share and units shipped[1][2][3][4] In China specifically, it seems to be around 20%[5]

And the idea of real people, having a real need for something in this very moment, is gonna care if they use a iOS app or a web app is pretty laughable too. Even with a worse user experience.

- 1) https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

- 2) https://www.statista.com/statistics/271496/global-market-sha...

- 3) https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile

- 4) https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

- 5) https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/china

There is more over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... as well that shows around the same number above too.

My two comments in this thread is just showing information taken from other sources, but they are getting downvoted. There is almost no opinion in these comments, so why the downvotes?

You’re saying it’s laughable to think people would not switch to a web app over an iOS app if the iOS app is no longer available?

There’s no way the vast majority of users would switch. This would be the case for any sort of app. But especially for a chat app.

Also, iOS users generally spend more money and I presume in cases like their China market share, are also higher net worth users. Losing iOS users would be more than just losing their small percent of the overall iOS/Android market share.

"You’re saying it’s laughable to think people would not switch to a web app over an iOS app if the iOS app is no longer available?"

No, I'm saying if there is a application that solves a real-world problem (like keeping track of where to protest about the future of your home or communication with people are not reachable elsewhere), people don't care if you open Safari and click on a bookmark or if they open a native application. As long as it works, people will use it in the way they can access it with their current device.

"Losing iOS users would be more than just losing their small percent of the overall iOS/Android market share"

Not sure how much that would actually effect the global market share.

I wonder if my version from F-Droid would also be taken down (assuming they would bother sending a letter to F-Droid LLC).

This is a lie. Telegram has not evaded Russia, has continuously lied about not having staff in .ru.

These aren’t honest people, on telegram.org they still continue to push lies about the “secure” and “encrypted” nature of telegram.

That's very true, I'm just wondering what buttons will they push to do that here given Telegram's background.

They instruct financial institutions world wide to cease processing transactions to/from telegram and freeze their accounts or lose access to the US banking system and risk having their assets frozen.

Pressure Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores?

At least on Android, Telegram is available via Fdroid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/

What percentage of Android users, or to be generous, Telegram users, are running Fdroid?

If you block Telegram from the Play store, suddenly most of them.

it's not a huge investment, and does not cost any money; market share really doesn't matter here when you can get in easily. you also can download the app on their website without installing their store app.

also keep in mind that telegram definitely can distribute their app on their website, like they do with desktop apps.

Yep, but that's the "open source" Android app, where the irregular code dumps are often weeks or months behind the released Play Store version...

And it uses openstreetmap tiles instead of sharing location data with google, and a few more such modifications.

That would only drive things more toward censorship-resistant blockchain-based app stores after Google and Apple's behavior with apps in Hong Kong.

> censorship-resistant blockchain-based app stores

Except that the word blockchain is entirely unnecessary here. How would IPFS not suffice? Or Bittorrent? Or Telegram itself. Unless no country on earth is willing to host X, X can host somewhere. This "X" can be Telegram itself or the app store that it is on. You make blockchain sound like magic pixie dust, but what the word means is something like git (see the Wikipedia page about it for a definition), not "magic pixie dust that makes something unblockable".

IPFS might suffice, it might not.

It also does happen to be Blockchain based . . .

Sounds like you're expressing cynicism more than an alternative pathway for achieving censorship-resistant blockchain-based app stores

No, it's not blockchain based.

How is IPFS blockchain based?

That would affect hundreds of millions of people who rely on their phone apps for chat. For others, Telegram would still work with its desktop clients as well as the browser based version at web.telegram.org.

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