Hacker News Reader

Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.

Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.

That's not it. I believe all the clients were built by employees. What he did was give each client to a very small, experienced team.

Too bad he gave the job of company cryptography team to his brother, Nikolai who's an expert in geometry, not cryptography.