If I understand correctly, Telegram has native apps on all platforms, and they are super fast and slick.
And it maddens me that their whole team, including ops and backend is like 50 people.
At the same time, they used some pretty unconventional ways to find brilliant people. For example, for iOS and Mac and android apps, they simply held a contest for the best open source app fitting succinct and reasonable requirements. The winner got sizable prize and place on the dev team.
Then they released that app as a Telegram X and then gradually sunset the older app.
Pretty neat on multiple fronts.
But that's how they get so much accomplished. Fred Brooks was correct in 1975 and is still right in 2021. Throwing headcount at a problem only delays it.
That's a huge understatement. When development tools improve and people get more productive, that observation gets more and more correct.
Thus, he is much more correct now than he was in 1975. And he was pretty much right by that time.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe Teams and its laggish bullshit nature as much as the rest of the pitchfork wielding people in this thread, it's just that it's not apples-to-apples comparison with a pure chat/call client and the headcount needed to develop it because of how much extra junk is hiding in Teams.