Durov is about as anti-Putin and russia in general as one can get. He go fucked hard in russia and has been going extremely hard against the censorship in russia. TG is one of the few chat apps that can avoid russia's suppression measures, when everything else working over internet fails.
Durov has been going hard against censorship because the pressure on Russians to switch to MAX might consign his own app to oblivion. But to call Durov “anti-Russia” when Telegram development and servers remained in Russia, is to ascribe to him a dissident status that he doesn’t actually deserve.
(Durov himself is known to regularly visit Russia, while denying he ever visits Russia. Telegram opened a Dubai office claiming that it was now a Dubai-headquartered company, but that was a mere legal formality; no one was actually there at that office, and journalists visiting it found that not even the building staff knew anything about Telegram. In practice, the company continues to exist out of Russia.)
He's been against it way before MAX was a thing. He visited russia, yes, like a lot of expats with families that are stuck back there. His last visit was in 2021, again, way before MAX was a thing.
If you ever actually lived under the regime where censorship was real - you'd be on Telegram too. When internet goes down and nothing works - Telegram keeps working.
Do you have a source for any of this? Wikipedia and news that I can find support that he fled Russia after government conflicts. It’s also well known that he keeps his and the dev team’s location secret, so anybody going knocking on incorporation addresses in Dubai then feigning surprise is acting in bad faith.
This was all over the news a couple of years ago when Russian entry/exit records were leaked. Doing a Google search for “durov visited russia frequently” will get you plenty of reportage.
"so anybody going knocking on incorporation addresses in Dubai" The point is that Telegram has repeatedly countered claims that it is a Russian app with "Actually, Telegram is a Dubai company”. People reasonably interpret that as more than a mere incorporation address, and it isn’t being emphasized enough that development is still largely done from Russia, and servers are also located there.
Half of Russian military uses it in the field. I do not care what story that guy is spreading around about his affiliations or lack of with Russia. Zero trust. Never touching Telegram.
Oh God not this stupid tweet again. He's "hacking" it from a rooted phone. You can't just willy nilly edit those files like that on a normal phone. Fml I would've written a CN under that.
The advanced flow is perfectly reasonable and I'm 100% sure there will be Magisk based bypasses for it if you absolutely require Google services + APK installs. The percentage of people installing legit 3rd party APKs is miniscule compared to the number of elderly scammed by these shitty apps. Glad Google is taking steps to close this security hole. Just wait the damn 24h you impatient "poweruser". 100% sure that there won't be a full lockdown or an extension of the timeout cuz this is gonna close most, if not all of the holes for these shitty apps.
How is this unreasonable? This is to prevent cases where people are told to urgently install the app while on a call, so the call has to be broken and person has a day to actually do something about the call.
Are you that zoomer brained to not be able to wait a day to install your APK?
If you work to inflict violence on others, you shouldn’t be surprised when it’s attempted to be inflicted back on you. I’m not saying it’s a just worldview, but it is pragmatic.
You live in a bubble. The roles are inversed. This is "ruining" Android for the 0.001% of power users that install .apk files and improving it for the huge chunk of population that are still getting hit by malicious ads that try to push app installs onto you.
Google is using scams as an argument for dismantling ownership and restricting the owner of a device from installing software of their own choice on their own device.
Yet they host the very ads that are part of these scams and profit from them. If Google wanted and actually cared about scams they would stop hosting these scam ads en mass.
It clearly is a pretense. This is not about scams and it will not stop with a ridiculous 24h waiting period to enable installing software. They will remove the option altogether.
Oh boy. They don't host these ads, there are plenty of ad providers that happily do though, outside of Google businesses (Meta). Google also isn't one homogenous business, Android people don't have direct access to the ads people.
This is about scams because 99% of all apk installs come not from basement power users installing cracked apps, but from the older people that are all too trusting to the internet that they're browsing.
I can also tell you from experience that malware Google search ads are common. Anyone who used to use Optifine knows that without an adblocker it was common for fake Optifine sites to be at the top of the results with a tiny marker saying "sponsored" or "ad".
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