Pavel Durov, often described as the Russian Mark Zuckerberg, launched an attack on Apple, saying that every time he uses an iPhone, he feels like he’s in the Middle Ages. The billionaire, a visionary of new technologies who has created his own secure messaging application “Telegram”, criticizes the company fiercely, saying that it “keeps users tied” to its products and turns them into digital slaves.

His vehement reaction emerged following a research publication made by the New York Times, which proved the relationship between Apple and China and specifically how crucial was Apple’s participation in the surveillance and censorship of citizens on a large scale, at the behest of China. Durov published this outburst on his Telegram personal profile, which is followed by approximately 600,000 people.

In his outburst, he argued that the company does not follow an ethical model of business practices, selling expensive, obsolete products that lock customers into their ecosystem.

In his tirade against Apple, he mentioned that the company’s worst practice is that it does not allow its users to install applications from different sources besides the App Store and does not allow the use of a different service than iCloud for device backup.

Durov, besides being a founder of new technologies, is an activist against authoritarian, centralizing regimes, mainly because he himself was a victim of power abuse from the government.

Durov founded the Russian social network medium “VK” in 2000, which, like Facebook, gained millions of users (VK currently counts over 100 million users even though its popularity is declining). However, in 2014, after years of attempts to buy it by billionaires close to Putin, Durov was forced to sell his stake from VK, fleeing from Russia, surrendering the independence and control of the social networking medium he himself created, to the Russian government.