The founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has publicly accused WhatsApp of borrowing many of its features from his platform. On his X page, he shared a timeline illustrating when these features appeared.

"Few WhatsApp users realize they are using a copy. Over 80% of its features were copied from Telegram – years ago" – wrote Durov.

In his post, he mentions the ability to create channels, edit sent messages, conduct polls, auto-delete messages, preview links, and even a dark mode. Commenters also pointed out that some features, like voice calls, were available in WhatsApp earlier, while end-to-end message encryption still isn’t standard in Telegram.

This isn’t the first time Pavel Durov has accused WhatsApp of copying Telegram’s features; he has periodically made such claims since 2014. Although Durov's projects are hard to call original, he completely copied the idea and design of Facebook for his social network 'VKontakte', and when he lost control over it, he launched Telegram in 2013. This was four years after WhatsApp was created by Ukrainian-born entrepreneur Jan Koum in 2009 and later acquired by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.

In a comment to an unnamed Russian magazine in August 2013, later quoted by Wired, Koum stated: "Pavel Durov can only copy great products like Facebook and WhatsApp; he has never had and will never have original ideas".

In 2018, Koum left Facebook due to disagreements over user data privacy and currently has no involvement in WhatsApp's development.

Nevertheless, WhatsApp remains the world's most popular messaging app, with over 3 billion active users monthly, according to Meta. Durov claims that as of March 2025, Telegram has over 1 billion active users each month.