A developer from Volgograd now living in Barcelona started building PING after staying in touch with friends and family in Russia became unpredictable. This is not another attempt to make one messenger “the main one,” but a story about taking responsibility for your own technology choices.
When distance became distance again
Messaging apps had almost taught people to ignore borders. Barcelona and Volgograd are thousands of kilometers apart, yet until recently that distance could be closed with one tap on a call button. Then familiar ways of staying in touch started failing. For Ilya Serdyukov, restrictions were no longer just another tech headline: they became the inability to talk normally with friends and family in Russia.
“The idea came from a very simple situation: I live in Barcelona, and my friends and family are in Russia. At some point I could no longer count on the usual messenger to let us call each other спокойно. So I decided to try building my own channel of communication,” Serdyukov says.
On August 13, 2025, Roskomnadzor announced a partial restriction on calls in Telegram and WhatsApp. Before that, access to Signal and Discord had been restricted in Russia. In each case the agency gave its own reasons, but for everyday users the practical result looked the same: a service a family or friend group used yesterday could work differently today. Interfax on Telegram and WhatsApp calls, Interfax on the Signal restriction, Interfax on the Discord restriction.
PING emerged as a practical response to that uncertainty. Not as a promise to bypass any restriction, and not as a guarantee of connection in any circumstance. No internet service can guarantee that. The idea was more precise: to build an additional communication channel that was designed from the start for unstable networks, changing access conditions, and the need to stay in touch across borders.
From commercial development to an in-house product
PING’s creator was born in Volgograd. Before PING, he worked on commercial projects for companies, including corporate messaging systems. That experience gave him not only an understanding of how chat looks on screen, but also the less visible side of a messenger: message delivery, server operations, device connections, and how an app behaves on a poor network.
The biography matters here not for its own sake. It explains why, when faced with the problem, he did not stop at looking for yet another alternative. He had already worked with similar systems and understood the scale of the task.
At the same time, he does not claim there are no other messengers in Russia. His position is more cautious: when development began, he did not see a product that simultaneously met his requirements for direct communication, cross-border use, adaptation to changing network conditions, and the creator’s personal responsibility for the service’s growth.
PING is not built as an attack on MAX, Telegram, WhatsApp, or any other product. Competitors may change, but the original problem remains: people should have a choice and an additional way to reach those who matter to them.
March 5, 2026
Full-scale development of PING began on March 5, 2026. That was the day the project got its first working repository. From then on, the idea turned into daily engineering work.
At the start, PING had no team and no ready infrastructure. One person built the project, combining the roles of founder and lead developer. He defined the product concept, designed the architecture, wrote the backend and the apps, worked on the interface, and set up the infrastructure.
It is important to describe that level of personal involvement accurately. A modern app is built on many languages, libraries, protocols, and tools developed by other engineers. But PING’s key decisions, how they were combined into one product, and responsibility for the result in the first months really were concentrated in one person’s hands.
“There were weeks when work took almost all my time. Sometimes I spent from morning till night on PING and barely had time to talk to my loved ones. There’s irony in that: I was building a communication tool while also giving it the time I could have spent with people. But it was important to me to get the project to a state where it really worked as quickly as possible,” he recalls.
This episode explains the personal cost of the project better than any general statement. And it also reminds us that speed of development should not become an excuse for unverified promises.
What PING is today
PING is still in active development. Current builds include one-to-one messaging, voice calls, and video calls. The public release of the apps is still being prepared, so working code should not be presented here as a release available to everyone. These features are the core of the product: find a person, write to them, and start a conversation.
Channels, spaces, and other group features are part of the next development stages. They are built into the product concept, but should not be described as complete until implementation and testing are finished.
This distinction matters. In the messenger market, trust is easy to lose with a loud announcement and hard to win back with a working update. That is why what has already been done in PING should be described in the present tense, and plans in the future tense.
The project’s first task is not to pack every possible feature into one app. It is to make direct messaging and calling understandable to the user, and to make the app behave predictably in real network conditions. Reliability here is not a marketing adjective, but an ongoing engineering focus.
A Russian project between Volgograd and Barcelona
PING is conceived as a Russian project by origin and by purpose. Its creator was born and raised in Russia, understands the experience of Russian users, and started the project as a response to the problem of staying in touch with people inside the country. Today he lives in Barcelona and manages development from there. There is no contradiction in that: it is precisely the distance between Spain and Russia that made the problem personal.
PING is primarily being built for people in Russia and Russian speakers who need an additional channel for communication. But that origin should not become a boundary for the product.
“I’m a Russian developer, and it matters to me that people in Russia and the Russian-speaking world have their own choice. At the same time, I’ll be glad if PING is useful to people in other countries too. Good communication should not divide nations. Its job is to help people talk to each other,” he explains.
PING does not claim official status as a national messenger and does not present a private initiative as a government project. Its patriotic meaning is different: a Russian engineer is not waiting for a ready-made answer, but investing his own time and expertise into a product he believes people in his country need.
That kind of patriotism does not need a slogan. It is judged by whether the technology works, whether its rules are clear to users, and whether the author is ready to stand behind his decisions.
Project control and the cost of resilience
According to him, PING is not being built for a quick sale. What matters to him is the ability to define the product’s direction himself and not give up control in exchange for short-term gain.
“I don’t have the goal of building a messenger just to sell it as quickly as possible. This is my idea and work, and I’m interested in continuing it. I want to keep the ability to develop PING according to the principles that made me start the project,” he says.
This is the founder’s position at this stage, not a promise that should replace transparent information about the project’s structure. As PING grows, users will need to understand who owns the product and brand, how the infrastructure is funded, and who influences key decisions.
He does not rule out a restrained advertising model in the future. The reason is pragmatic: messaging, calls, data storage, development, and support all require ongoing costs. The project has no right to pretend that this economy does not exist.
The exact monetization model has not yet been decided. If ads appear, their format and relation to user data should be explained before launch, not after. PING’s published privacy policy already states that the project does not sell personal data and does not use the content of private messages for ad profiling. Financial sustainability matters, but it should not be built on hidden rules. PING Privacy Policy.
What the founder is responsible for
The phrase “a specific person stands behind the product” only matters if it implies responsibility. Not for the internet never failing, and not for decisions by operators or governments that one developer cannot control. Responsibility begins where the project itself makes decisions.
Users owe nothing simply because this attempt is being made. Their trust has to be earned through the product’s work and the honesty of public statements.
Users are right to ask:
- whether PING describes finished features honestly;
- whether the project explains outages and limitations;
- whether it fixes bugs;
- whether it handles user data clearly;
- whether it maintains quality as it grows;
- whether it avoids replacing engineering work with loud promises.
Three or five years from now, PING will not be measured by how many patriotic phrases it uses. It will be judged by whether it has become a real, resilient, and understandable communication channel, and whether its creator is still ready to stand behind the product with his own name.
A project that is only beginning
It is still too early to describe PING as a finished success story. The project is young, its first full development phase began in spring 2026, and much of what was planned still lies ahead.
But it already has one important difference from an impersonal product page: the reason it exists is clear, the person making decisions is known, and the line between what works and what is still a plan has been defined.
PING was not created because the world needed one more icon on a phone screen. Staying in touch with Russia became less predictable for its creator, and his professional experience meant he could do more than just be frustrated by that situation — he could try to build his own answer.
This answer does not promise the impossible. It starts with a smaller and harder task: giving people one more way to message, call, and hear each other.
PING. Clear signal. Fast response.
