Telegram user here. I'm not anti-bot but puh-lease, spend this money on audited open-source crypto and secret-by-default chats rather than gimmicks like 'stickers' (yuk) and rewards for promising bots.
I want a messaging app that's simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that's splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed.
[edit] to clarify the term 'cross-device' - I mean I want to see my conversations on my phone, tablet and laptop and easily swap from one device to another. Platform support is a separate, also-important issue that Telegram already has nailed.
I figured someone would say that. I want actual cross-device, not Signal's weird "link your phone up to your MacBook" solution. So not Signal as it presently stands.
Also (last time I checked; maybe it has improved) Signal's support for inline media within conversations was light years behind Telegram.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud Signal's focus on security, but its usability simply isn't there yet.
I find signal really very usable. Huge doubts over telegram's security - it isn't there yet and doesn't sound like they even want it to be. Telegram seems like noise if security is interesting to you.
I can't reply to the post underneath yours but I very much agree with you and for me the reason I don't want the "link your phone to your macbook" solution is because my phone and it's number are very much not going to be permanent.
I do however have an email address I intend to use for a very long time.
I was actually looking for a chat solution earlier today and neither telegram nor signal fit the bill for these very reasons.
I want telegrams nice-looking apps, with signals security. Could I use WhatsApp? Maybe, but Facebook owning it makes me uncomfortable.
Why aren't you using Wire (https://www.wire.com)? It is cross platform, end to end secure w/ open source audited crypto, focuses on app usability, and doesn't need a phone number to sign up.
Trust issues with the founders (Skype hardly had a great privacy record); inability to build own APK (because only the crypto is open source) means you can't be sure the code on GitHub is what you're really running.
I had honestly never heard of it before. It looks good, but the website is completely lacking any information about the company which again makes me feel a little bit uneasy. I might try it, though.
> I want telegrams nice-looking apps, with signals security. Could I use WhatsApp? Maybe, but Facebook owning it makes me uncomfortable.
Exactly, bots are an interesting and cool idea, and they're obviously putting a lot of effort behind it. But it just pales in comparison to the huge leap WhatsApp took, by implementing Signal's encryption.
TBH, I hadn't expected that move from WhatsApp at all--and I'm still a tiny bit skeptical, because it almost sounds a bit too good to be true :)
I have been using Signal for a bit, too, but hadn't gotten around to read up on how Signal's encryption protocol works, but I intend to. This too seems almost too easy, to get zero configuration and hard security. Surely there must be some pitfalls or trade-offs I'm paying for that? Ok there's the verification codes, and I can see if the protocol properly tight and secure, that might get you there. But I expect that to still leave some minor pitfall(s), and I just kind of want to know what exactly those are.
On the other hand, Telegram's Linux desktop client is just glorious. Sync is perfect and instant. The whole GUI runs super-snappy even on my 4-year old low-powered netbook. Which is something I can't say for WhatsWeb. Because it's so smooth and instant-sync I use as one of my primary means of sending text or data between my netbook and my phone.
The other reason is that, my data is being slurped left and right by big foreign corporations operating under very nosy governments. Currently that is mainly the US government, given the software platforms I use. Even if I can't help those powers tapping my (meta)data, it still makes a lot of sense to divide up my data-trail between powers that are very unlikely to share this data with eachother.
And then, about half of my friends are on Telegram. Many of them for the two reasons above, others because the rest is there :-P I personally don't mind using more than one IM-app/network either. I have all the "messaging" stuff (including GMail, btw) grouped in one of those "folder" like icons on my homescreen (Android/Cyanogenmod), giving very quick access to any I need.
So yes, Telegram. Make with the hard encryption. I personally prefer it over bot-functionality, even though I think it is very shiny. But what I would really hate to see is an IM network with mediocre encryption "win" (popularity) over a network with much better encryption, just because it has a shiny bot platform.
So use chromium? Or have your messages stored by a third party in clear text - which seems like a far worse option than having a browser you don't otherwise have to use at all, installed.
No, you missed the point. They don't want Chrome, and if their aversion could be solved with small tweaks to the branding they'd have probably just gotten over it.
If you don't want to use chrome or chromium to run one single app to have proper encryption on your desktop in addition to your mobile device - which doesn't need a browser at all, and as a result of that "aversion" would prefer your messages are kept in clear text on a server your aversion is not worth considering further.
Or I'm wrong, what's the aversion that is more important than having your messages stored in clear text by a third party?
If Signal was available on F-droid and didn't depend on Play Services and Chrome (for Desktop) I'd be happier.
In my opinion Open Whisper Systems sacrificed the power users to be a safe messenger for the masses when they could've pleased the power users, who are key to driving mass adoption, too.
You make it sound as if people who do not want to use Play Services are the only power users. That is simply false, many power users don't care about using Play Services.
I think you're missing the point. Bots now use ML and other forms of weak A.I. Facebook is building something closer to artificial general intelligence with Facebook M. The early forms of bots we'll see will do basic tasks but in the future they'll be as smart or smarter than us. This is a great long term play Durov took by incentivizing bot developers. Besides, Telegram doesn't have the same scale as Facebook (FB Messenger) and Microsoft (Skype) so they sorta need to do this to remain competitive in their hyper competitive market.
If I had any gripes about Telegram it's their lack of audio and video calling but I'm not going to complain about an excellent free product.
Don't discount stickers. Telegram's sticker support (and its ease of creating your own sticker sets) is one of the reasons I and a lot of my friends have moved to it for most of our messaging lately. I personally went crazy and did a set of like 50 stickers with one of my own characters, which can add a ton of whimsey to my casual conversations.
Telegram really doesn't seem like they're trying to be a secure chat client at all at this point. It seems like the focus is more on making a follow-up runet social network now that Durov no longer has control over VK.
It echoes VK in a lot of ways (pirated media abounds!), but channels are some weird cross between Twitter and 4chan as opposed to being a blatant Facebook clone. Direct messaging is still there but it doesn't seem like the network is focused on that at all anymore.
I want a messaging app that's simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that's splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed.
[edit] to clarify the term 'cross-device' - I mean I want to see my conversations on my phone, tablet and laptop and easily swap from one device to another. Platform support is a separate, also-important issue that Telegram already has nailed.