Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia

Telegram App Says Apple Is Blocking Updates Over Dispute with Russia
nytimes.com

Mobile apps should not do ICO, period. It's irresponsible for someone to try stealing uneducated people's money while promising something that's impossible to achieve.

Realistically speaking there are only two players in the market: Google and Apple, both of which will happily comply with governments and regulators since they have no business in allowing gray area businesses, and that's a good thing.

However when you raise ICO, you're basically promising the censorship resistant future while fully knowing that it's impossible to achieve what you promised because your app is built on top of these centralized platforms.

This is on a completely different level in terms of scam factor when compared to naive idiots promising things like "putting grass-fed cows on the blockchain", because literally it's impossible to build a censorship-resistant, decentralized mobile app and they are the ones who know this the best.

I point this out because it looks as though all the press coverage seem to be focused on how Russia and Apple is censoring Telegram and Telegram is the victim, when Russia and Apple did nothing different from what they used to do. Russia has always been this way, and Apple has always tried its best to fight for user privacy but did make compromises when they really had to. It's great that Apple is doing its best to fight for user privacy but to be frank, Apple shouldn't be the one to blame here.

It's Telegram who decided to promote itself as a "censorship resistant decentralized blockchain application" to raise billions of dollars, and they got to this position because of this stance they had to take in order to raise the money. The only losers in this case are the idiots who invested in Telegram's ICO.

I don't really consider that a good thing. Having government controlled gatekeepers that take 20-30% off of every app with platform lock-in is not a great thing. We rail constantly about FBI/NSA enforced backdoors, especially people in Europe that are potentially having all their data harvested.

I said "That's a good thing" from Apple and Google's point of view. They are public companies with shareholders who don't want them to contribute to potentially illegal behaviors. So it's a "good thing" for them to have the companies comply with the governments.

But this phenomenon itself is not a good thing, so I do think decentralized projects should fix this problem. But centralized companies should not advertise themselves as being able to tackle this type of problem because it's not possible.

This brings us back to the original issue I pointed out. Telegram knows Very very well that they have this issue. Ask anyone who has built a mobile app if building a decentralized ecosystem on top of Apple appstore is possible and they would laugh at you. But Telegram did. And they raised billions of dollars for that false vision which they knew was impossible to achieve as a centralized organization with a product that depends on a centralized platform.

This really makes no sense on its face - if this is real Apple responding to Russian demands, why is Televram even available in the App Store at all?