INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
What a difference a day — one with a public lament — makes
Today the CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov announced that the messaging app is updating again on iOS, putting to a close a six-week freeze, where
Apple had stopped allowing Telegram to ship newer versions of the app globally, even while continuing to allow the app to live in the App
Store and allowing push notifications to those who already had it installed
Apple has also confirmed to us that it now allowing updates of the app again.
&Amazing news & Apple has just successfully reviewed our
latest update for Telegram iOS, and we were able to ship a new version with long awaited fixes and improvements to the AppStore,& he wrote
earlier today.
The change in course comes just one day after Durov announcedthere were some glitches in the app after the release of iOS
11.4 because Apple had stopped letting Telegram developers ship iOS updates globally
The lack of updates also meant the app was not compliant with GDPR regulations.
But what is still not completely clear is why Apple blocked
the updates in the first place, nor what happened in the last 24 hours to change things.
Durov has claimed the freeze on updates was tied to
the Russian government attempts to crack down on it: it came directly in the wake of regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) reportedly writing to
Apple to request it to remove the app from the App Store, and to stop allowing push notifications from the app for those who had already
(In fact, RKN only released its statement about this days ago.)
However, Apple never removed the app, nor did it comply with the request to
stop push notifications, even as it seemed to stop allowing Telegram to push updated versions.
&Apple has been preventing Telegram from
updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store,& he wrote yesterday
Google&s, Microsoft and Apple Mac app stores were not affected through all of this.
We have reached out to Telegram to see if it can explain
Apple has declined to comment specifically on this point.
The development today is the latest in a many-weeks saga that started with RKN
announcing a ban on Telegram after the app refused to provide it with a way of viewing the encrypted messages on the app.
Russian law
requires any apps or services operating in Russia to provide a way to monitor data in the app or service in question, by hosting servers in
the country or providing other means of data access
Itmandates this in the name of national security, although many third parties have disputed the requirement, and some like Telegram have
said that apart from the ideological opposition to the rule, it would be impossible for the company to provide such keys.
Durov had run
afoul of authorities with his previous company, the social network Vkontakte.com, over freedom of expression on the site, and that was part
of the motivation for building Telegram in such a way.
Telegram solution for the last several weeks has been towork around the issueby
appealing to people to use VPNs to access the service, and also by hopping on different IPs at hosting companies sympathetic to its attempt
to continue offering its service without sharing data with Russian authorities.
Up to now, services like AWS and Google Cloud Platform have
not asked Telegram to stop the hops, even despite some of the side effects: the IP hopping had the unintended consequence of RKN knocking
out entire swathes of IP addresses to stop Telegram, rising tosome 19 million IP addresses at its peakand causing a number of other services
to go down, including some of Google itself
The situation has alsoled to a number of protests, with the app and the story going viral in the process.
Telegram has some 200 million
users globally, with around 14 million users in Russia.
