Note: Telegram desktop alternative apps have major usability issues at least on Linux.
Edit: Also, many people refuse to install/use Chrome for various reasons, so even if you don't have to open ports, this still won't be a solution.
Let's be honest, there aren't many. Chromium is enough to please the majority of OSS people. And if they are not using Chrome for 'security' reasons they are very misinformed.
Chromium is the best product on the market. I honestly don't see what negative influence Google's business model has on it. I use Duckduckgo as my default search engine and Google doesn't do any monitoring/tracking in Chrome, despite what most people think.
Firefox is the best product on the market.
Google makes money from tracking people on the web. They will not introduce or develop new technology to their web browser which hits that revenue stream hard.
By using Chrome or Chromium you are giving them market share and therefore power to shape the future of the web. The future of the web under Googles custodian is more advertising, more tracking and less privacy.
It's pretty obvious.
Currently am using Firefox. Recently gave Chromium a good try for a month or so, for my personal experiences, right now best product on the market is Firefox. The address bar / search bar in Chromium is just inferior--you only get ~five autocompletes from your history and bookmarks, total. That basically means there's a reasonable chance the thing you're looking for will appear, but it's not really something you can rely on to navigate the personal knowledge base of bookmarks and history. Not talking about search suggestions btw. The other thing is Firefox Android supports Add-ons, so you can have uBlock and Ghostery on your phone (not even sure why anyone would even begin to consider a browser that doesn't support adblocking?) and Firefox Sync works well, to connect to the desktop and back (gave Pocket a try, didn't like it).
I also use DDG as default search in Firefox, very useful with the bang syntaxes, more powerful than Google (which is just a !g away anyhow). Also in Chromium, so the address bar feels more familiar and somewhat makes up for its lack of power :)
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...
This would require some kind of key exchange i.e. scanning bar codes.
I haven't looked into it at all, but one way I just thought of right now is to have your own devices p2p the message among themselves with original sender's information after the one used most recently receives it.
Do you know if it's open source or at least gone through an audit?
I don't know whether they have been formally audited.
Also have a look at https://wire.com/legal/#privacy
https://app.wire.com offers full functionality on Linux.
That tweet you link to is over a year old. Wire is E2EE since March 2016. https://wire.com/privacy has security and privacy whitepapers.
PS. I work at Wire.
But yeah, no encryption to speak of. So I'm no longer going to recommend Telegram over Whatsapp :) Just pointing out how much I like the UX of the Telegram client, no reason why you couldn't have that on a properly encrypted platform, after all :)