Pavel Durov

Then there is a small snippet in the message itself that, if you tap on it, highlights the original message you're replying to.

Seems pretty obvious.

But there are certain design decisions that we were implementing at the time, and we got this vertical line on the left, and all these other small things that are completely arbitrary, right?

You can do it in a different way.

But somehow the entire industry ended up copying exactly that solution.

So now whenever you go to WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, Signal, it doesn't matter.

You would see exactly the same or pretty much similar experience because nobody really wants to take the risk and innovate.

If something works, why not just copy it?

That's the hardest part.

To make it look so that designers love it is one thing.

The real challenge is make it look the way the designers love it and make it work on the weakest device as possible, the oldest, cheapest smartphones you can imagine.

If you take the moving gradient on the background of every Telegram chat,

This is something most people don't notice, but they can feel it.

Or efficient, but not too beautiful.

Because even doing something so trivial as a gradient can result in noticeable lines in the gradient that person can instantly say, oh no, it's not the right thing.

So you can have to introduce certain randomness there.

And then you have the gradient, but it's not enough.

It's too plain.

You want to have certain pattern as an overlay, but it should be simple enough not to...

distract you from the content but it has to be entertaining enough to create a good feeling about the whole app and another question what kind of objects you want to include in this pattern and how this pattern would work will it be based on pixels or would it be vector-based and would it be vector-based so they will be infinitely scalable and high quality