Official Telegram apps temporarily removed from the App Store

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov releases a statement in a short tweet.

The popular messaging app Telegram and variant Telegram X have vanished from Apple's App Store due to 'inappropriate content', although founder Pavel Durov claims that the apps are gone because of a minor issue and should resurface soon.

Jonathan Maes, Published 02/01/2018

Users on Reddit noticed the disappearance of both official Telegram applications this past Wednesday, and the apps still aren’t available to download on the Apple App Store at the moment of writing. Both Telegram and Telegram X were removed, the latter being a faster variant with experimental features coded in the Swift programming language.

Founder and CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov replied with a short tweet that there’s a 'minor issue' and both apps should be back soon. He also wrote a follow-up tweet explaining why the popular chat apps were taken down.

We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store.

Only the iOS versions of the popular messaging app seem to suffer from this issue, as both Telegram and Telegram X are still available to download on the Google Play Store. The company announced that they had 100 million monthly active users in 2016.