Are you using WhatsApp with an Android device? Well, you’ve probably already noticed a singular problem that is causing a lot of debate among instant messaging apps users. It seems that this issue came with the latest update of WhatsApp for Android, version 2.12.367. It has been noticed that with this last version you still can see the links to Telegram website, telegram.me and telegram.org, but unfortunately they don’t work as hyperlinks, so you cannot access Telegram (which, for the record, is the biggest competitor of WhatsApp) straight from WhatsApp.
What happened exactly? It clearly seems another step dictated by the tough rivalry between the two successful instant messaging apps, but for the moment there are not official statements coming from the Facebook-owned service. This issue was highlighted by many (annoyed) users and also by Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, who took the opportunity to post a screenshot on Twitter together with this message: “Whatsapp started censoring links to Telegram in their Android app (i.e. for ~80% of the users).” And the problem is strange indeed and, considering the well-known feud between the two apps, the worst suspects seem to be justified, even if it is more likely that this is simply a bug (this time a big one, also in terms of image).
If WhatsApp is doing incredibly well (latest statistics report 900 million monthly active users), Telegram has no intention to loose this battle nor to throw in the towel. In fact, according to them, today there are 12 billion messages sent every day via Telegram, while its monthly active users are 62 million (according to last statistic of May 2015). However, it seems that this block is not occurring on iOS and Web client, and this strengthens the hypothesis of a bug. But rumours differ, and during the last few hours there’s a rush to find out what’s actually happening.