Yesterday we shipped the fourth major update of Telegram in the last 2 months. This time we radically improved chat backgrounds.

It seems iOS users have to wait a while to get the update, because the App Store has been experiencing issues since yesterday. I expect that Apple is going to get their issues sorted out in the next few hours as Cupertino is waking up.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t have such outages, so Android users can enjoy Telegram v5.3 right away. As for their less fortunate iOS counterparts, they are welcome to have a look at the sneak peak below to get a taste of what’s coming.

We’ve just started Instant View 2.0 Competition – our crowdsourcing contest with a prize fund of $300,000, ending on the 4th of April.

The goal is to create sets of rules (“templates”) that are used to generate beautiful “Instant View” previews for links shared on Telegram. Anyone with an understanding of HTML/CSS can participate. Participants get $100 for each correct template + $10,000 and $5,000 to top 2 contributors.

Check out the rules here – https://instantview.telegram.org/contest

We’ll launch more similar competitions for developers soon. Eventually there’ll be a competition for everything we do (Android, C++, voice calls etc). Winners get mighty prizes and a chance to join our dev team.

Stay tuned – we’ll announce the next competition within 10 days.

I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.

Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.

Today the Russian authorities tried to hack 4 journalists covering the Ekaterinburg protests. Fortunately, all those attempts have failed due to the 2-step verification check.

This serves as a reminder that authoritarian governments will stop at nothing to violate their citizens' privacy. We urge users in such countries to double check that they have 2-step verification set up.

Stay safe and stay strong 💪🏾