Barcelona - The cloud-based messaging industry is gaining another competitor as Telegram eclipses the 100-million-user mark and continues to grow.
Two and a half years after launching, Telegram announced that it delivers 15 billion push notifications daily and 350 000 users sign up to the service each day.
Telegram still lags well behind the industry giant WhatsApp, which was bought up by Facebook in February 2014 and sends 42 billion messages a day and has over a billion users.
The app was created by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who launched Russia's largest social networking site VKontakte.
Pavel Durov publicly supported Apple boss Tim Cook in the recent dispute between Apple and the US government to unlock the iPhone of one of the shooters in a terrorist attack on California.
Durov said Telegram does not have any main headquarters to avoid influences from one authority. Its 45 or so employees regularly move offices, having previously worked in San Francisco, London, Berlin and Paris.
ANA-DPA