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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

I kinda doubt that part. If he was in their good graces again I think we'd hear more about it But I think Russia is a much bigger market for Telegram than Iran was. It's where they started after all.

I'm pretty sure that'll play a part in it too. Easy thing to throw away 0.5% of your marketshare, another when it's 20%. Ps I made those numbers up :)

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When Russia wanted some kind of encryption keys he could not hand over because they dont exist, Telegram was banned in Russia but people found ways to use it anyway. So I dont think Russia has anything to "force" Durov other than via Apple/Google. He doesn't live there or owns anything there and according to past posts of him and there are no Telegram servers there either. + The proxy stuff to circumvent Russia's ban is already implemented if they would block the IPs again.

It seems very likely that Apple/Google is actually the problem here. I encourage everyone to download the app from the website or F-Droid not form Google.

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There is a sideloaded version of Telegram for Android which can be installed from it's website and even is able to auto-update itself. It allows access to content blocked on iOS. But it was unable to access voting bot.

I dont think bots have the flags for blocking only in some apps like channels and groups have.

The bot runs on someone else machine and telegram most likely just temporary disabled the token to disable the bot from communicating with the telegram bot API. This then ofc affects all front ends/apps.

Client was showing something like "this content is illegal" instead of bot answers. It is now showing the original answers instead of these placeholders, which means the data was always there, it was just replaced on the fly for accounts with Russian registration.

Then they apparently did not turn off the bot itself.

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