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He mentioned that Telegram used Google and Apple's notifications to push fresh ip addresses to the app. Russian authorities can't block notifications selectively to the Telegram app, only to all apps that use Google's and Apple's infrastructure.

> Russian authorities can't block notifications selectively to the Telegram app, only to all apps that use Google's and Apple's infrastructure.

But they can ask Apple and Google to ban it.

Yes and in fact this is exactly what they did to Telegram for a while. But they found ways around it like those changing IPs.

They obviously could, but these days everybody uses CDNs and shared resources so they'd probably end up blocking a lot more than just this app.

For instance the app could well function completely offline if it embedded the list of candidates it supports, it which case they'd have to block all requests to the Google Play Store which would be rather heavy handed and unpopular.

I'm sure this was the easiest path this time.

They have in the past blocked large swaths of AWS to block this app:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16859299