Telegram outsources parts of its development into multi-stage coding contests[1] with prize money. I don't know why they decided to keep two separate versions in the end, but I assume they both came out of the Javascript contest.

[1] https://contest.com/

They did this a while back with their Android (and iOS?) apps--they had the core Telegram app, and Telegram X. Both had 90% overlapping features, but some subtle differences. It's long enough ago that it's a bit fuzzy in my head, but I think X had slightly better reply gestures, and maybe chat pinning.

Later I think they absorbed the X features into the core app.

I can't decide if I think it's an awesome strategy to launch a self-competing project, or if it just leads to terrible internal issues. I'm leaning more towards the former--I'm a huge believer in the instructive power of contrast, and it's a lot "safer" to contrast against another one of your own products than a competitor. You control much more of the "experiment", and you don't run the risk of cannibalizing your own users.

Plus, from an engineering standpoint, it forces you to have portable technologies and configs, and probably gives your team opportunities to learn from greenfield stuff that can then encourage refactors or other paying-down-tech-debt activities.

It's also just dang impressive that they're able to spin up multiple versions of the same app, and deploy them, and maintain them. That speaks volumes to me about their internal systems, build systems, resource allocation, etc.

From what I can tell so far webz appears to be using significant amount of wasm.

Yeah that's a bit strange. My guess is that they use different tech or techniques under the hood and eventually one will be picked as a winner and become just web.telegram.com or they'll take ideas from both and merge into a single one. It kinda looks like a poor man's A/B test.

Telegram devs compete internally.