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Thoughts from the CEO of Telegram
👨💻 We prepared some Halloween surprises for you, but it seems someone doesn’t want us to celebrate. Telegram's latest update has been stuck in Apple Review for more than a week, and we have not been informed about the current reason for the delay ⛔️
Apple claims they review apps within 24 hours, but, in our experience, it takes at least 7-10 days for any meaningful product update to reach the App Store. My friends who run smaller apps tell me it's even worse for them, as they have to wait more than a month just to ship bug fixes to their Apple users 😵💫
However, positive change is coming. Tomorrow, a new set of laws called the Digital Markets Act will come into force in the European Union. This regulation should put an end to the abuse of market power by gatekeepers like Apple and Google.
We, the developers, should start relying on the DMA to defend ourselves and our users. If you are an app developer who faces issues with the App Store or Google Play, let me know about it at pavel@telegram.org from your company e-mail address with the word "DMA" in the title. It will be up to Apple to decide if they want to spend their resources on improving their processes — or on fines.
Happy Halloween! 🥳
Time to fight some demons 😈
Some content creators started using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts in their Telegram channels. This way, content creators could receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid, which was great.
Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices.
This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content. I hope that the regulators in the EU, India and elsewhere start taking action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is higher than any government-levied VAT.
In the meantime, we at Telegram shall work to offer creators powerful and easy-to-use tools to monetize their content – outside of Apple's restrictive ecosystem.