Telegram aims to compete with WhatsApp to become the most influential instant messaging application in the market. Following WhatsApp’s update trend, where they’ve begun supporting broadcast channels, the Russian messaging service is reportedly working on enhancing the available functions in Telegram for these channels, opening new paths for customization.
Channels have always been one of Telegram’s standout features. Present on the platform for many years, it wasn’t until a few months ago that WhatsApp chose to mimic this successful functionality. Given the significant results that the Meta-owned app is achieving, Telegram wants to continue positioning itself as the perfect application for following all sorts of channels.
Improvements for the channels
As detailed by TechCrunch, Telegram’s plans to compete with WhatsApp in the area of channels will involve enhancing the functionalities currently available in these channels. Among other things, one of the improvements being worked on is to enhance channel search, providing more precise recommendations based on your personal interests or other channels you frequently access.
In this way, Telegram aims to prevent WhatsApp from gaining ground in one of the functions that has always been more popular among Pavel Durov’s app users. However, WhatsApp, with a larger user base, has the main advantage that, thanks to its channels, many users might start to do without Telegram’s services. Therefore, the paper airplane app will strive to offer, as always, a higher-quality service than its competition.
Telegram as an inspiration for WhatsApp
It’s already known in the common imagination that, for years, many of WhatsApp’s improvements are based on copying functions that already existed in Telegram, providing the latter with a higher quality service than Mark Zuckerberg’s chat application. However, with commercial advantage as protection, Meta never hesitated to adopt the improvements that worked best for Telegram.
One of these functions is the aforementioned introduction of channels in WhatsApp, but in 2023 there have been several more, such as the ability to send instant videos, which had also been in Telegram for years, or even the sticker recommendation, also present long before in WhatsApp’s main rival. What will be the next Telegram feature that Meta’s service decides to copy? Sooner or later, it will be known.
