Telegram founder Pavel Durov accuses Apple of destroying dreams, crushing entrepreneurs

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has accused Apple of destroying dreams and crushing entrepreneurs with its App Store policies. In his latest post on his official Telegram channel, Durov said that Apple is abusing its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetise their own content.

“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,” the Telegram founder wrote in his post on the platform.

“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,” he added.

His comments came after Apple forbade Telegram and creators on the platform from monetising their content by bypassing Apple’s in-app payments systems.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Telegram was testing a new ‘paid-posts’ feature in its iOS app that would enable content creators to earn more revenue by selling their posts in the messaging app. In essence, the feature allowed creators to charge money for people to view specific messages.

However, this feature didn’t rely on Apple‘s in-app payments system that requires developers to give a 30 percent cut to the company. Instead, content creators started using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts in their Telegram channels. This enabled them to receive close to 100 percent of whatever their subscribers paid, which the Telegram founder said, “was great”.

As soon as the word spread, Telegram was asked to shut down this feature as it bypassed Apple’s in-app payments system and hence was against the company’s App Store policies. “Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30 percent tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices,” Durov said.

That said, the Telegram founder assured developers and content creators that the company was working on offering ‘easy-to-use tools to monetize their content – outside of Apple’s restrictive ecosystem.’ One such effort is a platform called Fragment wherein users can buy Telegram usernames. “In a few days, we will also introduce the ability for users to sell their existing usernames on Fragment,” the Telegram founder had said in a separate post announcing the feature.

“For the first time in the history of social media, a fair, transparent market for usernames is established. Finally, people will have ownership over their social media addresses, secured in the immutable ledger of a decentralized blockchain network,” he had added.

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