As we reported yesterday, Telegram’s CEO said that Apple was blocking the company from releasing updates to the messaging service since Russian authorities deemed the app illegal. Now, Apple and Telegram have come to some sort of solution… It’s unclear how Russia’s ban on the messaging app influenced Apple to block updates for Telegram globally. But whatever the issue was, it seems to be resolved now. Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, shared in a tweet today a thank you to Tim Cook and Apple for allowing the company to release its first update since March. This is a notable update as Telegram was a bit late to implementing changes needed as GDPR went into effect at the end of last month. Here are the release notes for today’s Telegram update: GDPR Update Updated the registration process. If you live in the UK or EU, you must be 16 years or older to use Telegram. When signing up for Telegram, you accept our Privacy Policy. You can now stop updating your contacts and delete your synced contacts in Privacy & Security settings. If you enabled link previews in Secret Chats, you can now disable them in Privacy & Security settings. Telegram is a free download from the App Store. Thank you @Apple and @tim_cook for letting us deliver the latest version of @telegram to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks. — Pavel Durov (@durov) June 1, 2018 Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More. Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news:<doc-sep>Encrypted messaging app Telegram is feeling the squeeze out of Russia, where regulators are not letting up in their ongoing attempts to block the app because its publishers refuse to provide regulators with access to messages on the platform. Pavel Durov announced in a statement on Telegram that the iOS app may be having issues with certain features like stickers after the iOS 11.4 update this week. That is because updates to the app are being prevented globally, he said, by Apple after the Russian regulator ordered Apple (in April) to remove Telegram from the App Store altogether. Durov said this has also meant that Telegram has not been able to issue a GDPR update to comply with the new European regulations that went into effect last week. For now, Telegram is still in the App Store, albeit with an out-of-date, non-GDPR-compliant version of the app. And confusingly, the move doesn’t apply to all platforms: the Telegram app for Mac is still updating. Separately, Durov confirmed to TechCrunch that the same issue is not applying to versions in Google Play and the Windows store, and that for now Telegram will stay online in Russia. “Apple has been restricting us from pushing new Telegram versions since mid-April [but] we haven’t had any such issues with Google Play / Microsoft Store. The Android app has been successfully updated many times during the last six weeks,” he said. Google had received a request from the Russian regulator at the same time as Apple, on April 17. In response to questions about whether it will Telegram will get removed altogether, he was unequivocal that it will remain no matter what happens with the stores. “Telegram is accessible in Russia due to the built-in anti-censorship tools,” he said. The news caps off what has been a difficult week for Telegram. Days ago, the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) announced that it had made a formal request to Apple to stop distributing the app, and also to stop enabling push notifications for those who already have the app downloaded in Russia. Durov’s full statement, plus some more backstory below that: “Unfortunately, some Telegram features, such as stickers, don’t work correctly under iOS 11.4 that was just released – even though we fixed this issue weeks ago,” Durov wrote minutes ago in his Telegram channel. “Apple has been preventing Telegram from updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store. Russia banned Telegram on its territory in April because we refused to provide decryption keys for all our users’ communications to Russia’s security agencies. We believe we did the only possible thing, preserving the right of our users to privacy in a troubled country. “Unfortunately, Apple didn’t side with us. While Russia makes up only 7% of Telegram’s userbase, Apple is restricting updates for all Telegram users around the world since mid-April. As a result, we’ve also been unable to fully comply with GDPR for our EU-users by the deadline of May 25, 2018. We are continuing our efforts to resolve the situation and will keep you updated. “Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.” Notably, for now it seems that the app — an older version of it — is still available in the App Store. Apple, according to a report this week, has one month from May 28 to comply with a request to remove it completely. It’s not clear what the consequences would be if it failed to do so. “We sent them [Apple] a legally binding letter and are awaiting their legally binding reply. Because Apple, like other transnational companies, is a company with a high degree of red tape, we expect the reply within a month,” RKN’s head Alexander Zharov said to Russian news agency Interfax. RKN has been seeking to shut down use of Telegram in the country for months, but for most of that time Telegram has been working around the issue by appealing to people to use VPNs to access the service, and also by hopping around IPs at hosting companies sympathetic to its attempt to continue offering its service without sharing data with Russian authorities. Its hopping had the unintended consequence of RKN knocking out entire swathes of IP addresses to stop Telegram, some 19 million at its peak, causing a number of other services to go down as well. But even so, the app has gone viral with the attention, which had also prompted a number of protests. But despite the attention, it is unclear how this might have translated to usage and app installs. The most recent figures released by Telegram note that there are about 200 million monthly active users, with 14 million in Russia, although those figures predate the scuffle with Russian regulators. Downloads as tracked by AppAnnie, in fact, seem to point to a slight dip in downloads in Russia after the RKN blocks started in April, although those numbers only count App Store downloads. Surprisingly, and maybe because of how popular the resistance was proving to be, it looked like several of the key cloud hosting companies, such as Google and Amazon’s AWS, where Telegram along with many other sites and apps host their data and operations, had decided to hold firm to see how things would develop, even when their own consumer-facing services were suffering. So it seemed only a matter of time before RKN would soon turn to app store operators to turn the screws further. Apple, it seems, has been the first to go down, specifically with regards to updating the app in the App Store. Logically, it seems that the Play Store and others might also feel the squeeze, too. We are contacting Apple for further comment, and also Google to see if the Play Store is also being affected, and we will update this post as we learn more. Updated with response from Pavel Durov. More to come.<doc-sep>Apple has finally approved an updated version of the Telegram iOS app, after the secure messaging company’s chief executive complained yesterday that the iPhone maker was blocking updates worldwide due to a Telegram ban in Russia. The news was announced on Twitter by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. The Russian government first ordered a ban on Telegram back in mid-April, citing Telegram’s refusal in an ongoing court battle to hand over encryption keys that would allow the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB) access to sensitive user data. The ban has proved troublesome for Telegram, as it’s led to the blocking of millions of IPs on Amazon and Google’s cloud platforms and requests from the Russia government that American companies, like Apple, pull the software from their respective app stores. Russia’s ban on Telegram is causing a lot of trouble for the company Apple, it seems, did not pull Telegram from the Russia version of the App Store. That led Russian authorities to send a supposedly legally binding letter to the company yesterday demanding it remove the app within one month or face some type of punishment for violating local law. But regardless, Apple was for some reason blocking Telegram iOS updates from as far back as March from going out worldwide, and not just for users in Russia. That was a big issue, Telegram’s Durov pointed out, because it meant the iOS version of the app was not compliant with the European Union’s new GDPR privacy law that went into effect last week. Being in violation of GDPR could result in steep fines. “Apple has been preventing Telegram from updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store,” Durov wrote in a public Telegram message yesterday. “While Russia makes up only 7 percent of Telegram’s userbase, Apple is restricting updates for all Telegram users around the world since mid-April.” After Durov sounded the alarm over the situation, Apple apparently let Telegram’s iOS app first update in months go through. In his announcement of the successful update, Durov thanked Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, for allowing the updates to go through, “despite the recent setbacks.” We don’t yet know what’s going to happen to the Russia version of Telegram for iOS, but suffice to say that Durov and his company still have a fight on their hands with the Russian government going forward.<doc-sep>
What a difference a day — one with a public lament — makes. Today the CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov announced that the messaging app is updating again on iOS, putting to a close a six-week freeze, where Apple had stopped allowing Telegram to ship newer versions of the app globally, even while continuing to allow the app to live in the App Store and allowing push notifications to those who already had it installed. Apple has also confirmed to us that it’s now allowing updates of the app again. “Amazing news – Apple has just successfully reviewed our latest update for Telegram iOS, and we were able to ship a new version with long awaited fixes and improvements to the AppStore,” he wrote earlier today. The change in course comes just one day after Durov announced there were some glitches in the app after the release of iOS 11.4 because Apple had stopped letting Telegram’s developers ship iOS updates globally. The lack of updates also meant the app was not compliant with GDPR regulations. But what is still not completely clear is why Apple blocked the updates in the first place, nor what happened in the last 24 hours to change things. Durov has claimed the freeze on updates was tied to the Russian government’s attempts to crack down on it: it came directly in the wake of regulator Roskomnadzor (RKN) reportedly writing to Apple to request it to remove the app from the App Store, and to stop allowing push notifications from the app for those who had already installed it. (In fact, RKN only released its statement about this days ago.) However, Apple never removed the app, nor did it comply with the request to stop push notifications, even as it seemed to stop allowing Telegram to push updated versions. “Apple has been preventing Telegram from updating its iOS apps globally ever since the Russian authorities ordered Apple to remove Telegram from the App Store,” he wrote yesterday. Google’s, Microsoft’s and Apple’s Mac app stores were not affected through all of this. We have reached out to Telegram to see if it can explain the change of course. Apple has declined to comment specifically on this point. The development today is the latest in a many-weeks saga that started with RKN announcing a ban on Telegram after the app refused to provide it with a way of viewing the encrypted messages on the app. Russian law requires any apps or services operating in Russia to provide a way to monitor data in the app or service in question, by hosting servers in the country or providing other means of data access. It mandates this in the name of national security, although many third parties have disputed the requirement, and some like Telegram have said that apart from the ideological opposition to the rule, it would be impossible for the company to provide such keys. Durov had run afoul of authorities with his previous company, the social network Vkontakte.com, over freedom of expression on the site, and that was part of the motivation for building Telegram in such a way. Telegram’s solution for the last several weeks has been to work around the issue by appealing to people to use VPNs to access the service, and also by hopping on different IPs at hosting companies sympathetic to its attempt to continue offering its service without sharing data with Russian authorities. Up to now, services like AWS and Google Cloud Platform have not asked Telegram to stop the hops, even despite some of the side effects: the IP hopping had the unintended consequence of RKN knocking out entire swathes of IP addresses to stop Telegram, rising to some 19 million IP addresses at its peak and causing a number of other services to go down, including some of Google’s itself. The situation has also led to a number of protests, with the app and the story going viral in the process. Telegram has some 200 million users globally, with around 14 million users in Russia.