The competition between messaging apps is so intense that it seems to be making them block their rivals.
This might sound a little absurd, but that’s exactly what seems to be the case between popular messaging apps – WhatsApp and Telegram.
According to Pavel Durov, Founder of Telegram, WhatsApp is killing all links containing the domain of Telegram on its messaging app. It is also preventing users from copying and pasting URLs containing the Telegram domain.
Users can still share Telegram links but they’re treated as regular messages and not hyperlinks.
The Quint’s Test
We decided to test it out independently and found that the link seems to working correctly on the iOS platform. However, on Android phones the links aren’t openable. Meanwhile, we noticed something weirder on the desktop version of WhatsApp: links with the URL telegram.me don’t work, but those with the URL telegram.org do. (Both the links lead to the same page.)
According to The Verge Telegram is unaffected and says “typically after a media backlash, Facebook steps back and blames their intelligent filtering for the problem. We expect the same to happen this time as well.”
It will be interesting to see what the Facebook owned WhatsApp has to say about this. Watch this space.
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