In late September, Russian federal media reported the launch of the Orthodox messenger Zosima. The app was said to have become available for download on Google Play starting September 24.
Reports compared Zosima’s features to the “hostile” WhatsApp and the “native” VK. At the same time, they stressed that the new service would supposedly spare Orthodox users from indecent advertising and insults to believers’ feelings, while erotic content and obscene language would be blocked by its “spiritual filters.”
The project’s creators scheduled a large press conference and presentation in Moscow for October 30. The developers were named as the charitable foundation Innotekh XXI and sole proprietor Denis Andreyevich Osipov.
However, the messenger currently remains nonfunctional. Journalists found that the lead developer was the same Denis Osipov, an 18-year-old programmer from Krasnodar. According to the article, he managed to build a more or less modern interface and basic messenger functions, but overlooked many technical details.
IT experts interviewed for the story said that building such a product on the Russian market now would cost no more than 200,000 rubles. In their view, the main expenses in projects like this are tied not so much to development itself as to maintaining the social network afterward.
As the number of users grows, the load on servers and the platform’s overall architecture increases, and costs rise geometrically along with it. Even so, the Innotekh XXI foundation says that about 30 programmers worked on Zosima, though journalists have so far been unable to find any of them.