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PC: indiatoday

Telegram has become a topic of discussion in India these days. Following the advice of the National Testing Agency (NTA), the Government of India has temporarily banned the platform till June 22 to prevent the spread of leaks and rumors to NEET. This move has sparked discussions and debates on social media.

The matter became even more heated when Telegram CEO Pavel Durov publicly accused Reliance of blocking access to the app outside India. Given that Meta has invested in Reliance and Meta owns WhatsApp, Durov said this could be part of a competition battle. Even if we don’t go into this angle, people are mostly wondering why Telegram is banned and not WhatsApp or Signal or any other chat app. This is a valid question until you look deeper and understand what Telegram is offering – and WhatsApp is not.

Telegram has many features that allow information to be spread on a large scale and the government, or rather the NTA, has made it clear that this ban is only to prevent misinformation and fraud to the NEET paper, even though the question paper for the re-exam to be held on June 21 is safe while writing. In comparison, WhatsApp is a little more restrictive. Additionally, there are some other features that are available only on Telegram and not on WhatsApp.

Here are five features that make Telegram different from WhatsApp:

1. Chat by username without sharing your phone number
Both Telegram and WhatsApp are essentially messaging platforms, but their approach to privacy is quite different. Telegram seems to focus more on anonymity, allowing users to hide their phone numbers and connect with others using just a username. It’s a small but important feature that adds a nice layer of privacy to the experience. WhatsApp, on the other hand, still ties everything to your phone number, which means you’ll have to share it with anyone you want to connect with, even for the most casual conversations. WhatsApp is said to be working on bringing username-based connectivity to its platform, which suggests that Meta also recognizes Telegram’s appeal.

2. Self-destructing messages with timer
Telegram lets users set a custom self-destruct timer on individual messages in secret chats. WhatsApp currently has a disappearing messages feature, but the messaging platform is reportedly working on a feature that will make messages disappear in just 15 minutes, which clearly looks like someone has taken notes from Telegram. Similarly, Telegram also lets you schedule messages to be sent at a specific time, a handy feature that WhatsApp is currently testing.

3. Advanced Chat Customization
In terms of chat customization, Telegram users get more freedom to personalize their chatting compared to WhatsApp. It lets users create their own themes, change chat backgrounds, adjust colors, and use animated emojis and effects to make conversations more personal. Although WhatsApp has recently introduced similar features, they are behind a paywall for premium users.

4. Bots and Mini Apps
Another area where Telegram stands out is its support for bots and mini apps. These tools can add extra functionality inside chat, allowing users to automate tasks, manage groups, create polls, play games, or even access certain services without leaving the app. This makes Telegram more than just a messaging platform and allows users to do a variety of things in conversations.

5. Large groups and message editing
Now, those things which can lead to ban. Telegram allows admins to create large groups that can have up to 2,00,000 members at a time, which means anyone can create an anonymous group and broadcast their messages to a large group of people. FYI, WhatsApp groups can currently only have 1,024 members. There is also a way of file-sharing where if one has availed Telegram’s premium service, one can share files as big as 4GB, whereas for free users it is 2GB (WhatsApp also has the same 2GB limit, but there are no paid extras). Finally, the most talked about feature of Telegram, message editing, allows admins to edit posts while maintaining the original timestamp. The government has asked Telegram to stop this message editing feature by June 30. On WhatsApp, when you edit a message, the timestamp also updates to reflect the change on the front end.