Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, has accused WhatsApp of replicating numerous features from his messaging platform. He shared a detailed timeline on his X page, illustrating how these features emerged in both apps.

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

In his post, Durov mentions features like channel creation, message editing, polls, auto-deletion, link previews, and even dark mode. In response, some commenters pointed out that certain features, such as voice calls, appeared in WhatsApp earlier, not to mention end-to-end encryption, which is still not enabled by default in Telegram.

This isn’t the first time Durov has accused WhatsApp of copying; he's made these claims periodically since 2014. While Durov's own projects are also hard to call original, he completely copied the idea and design of Facebook for his social network VKontakte before launching Telegram in 2013. This happened four years after WhatsApp was founded 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 never will have original ideas".

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

Nonetheless, WhatsApp remains the world's most popular messaging app, with over 3 billion active users monthly, according to the latest data from Meta. Durov claims that as of March 2025, Telegram had over 1 billion active users monthly.