It might have been an intentional tradeoff when Telegram came out, but it's not any more. It's not a great defense for the fact that you chat history exists in plain text on Telegram servers.
I personally use Telegram when talking to my wife because it lets me have a client on every platform i use and the messages follow me. I could do that with some of the other platforms as well, but im already on this platform, the wife is on the platform, and some other family members as well. Now would it be better if it was "more" secure? Of course it could, I mean, we could all be communicating with PGP as well, but most people don't because its a pain to use. So to me personally, Telegram is a useful middle ground between great security and usability.
As a added bonus, using the bot framework that Telegram offers, i have started creating a home automation bot. The framework is really fun and easy to use.
Same. I tried Signal a couple of years ago but the iOS app was prone to crashing, corrupting messages, and just plain losing words. Not really what you want.
> The framework is really fun and easy to use.
Yeah, I've done a couple of bots for it and it's pretty handy.
Source? https://telegram.org/blog/sessions-and-2-step-verification says:
"It allows you to set up a password that will be required every time you log into your account from a new device – in addition to the code you get in the SMS.
Be careful though: if you forget this password, you won't be able to access your messages from other devices."
This sounds to me that the chat history is encrypted with the password which doesn't leave my devices and therefore I'm not able to recover the history if I lose it. Since all clients are open-source, it should be possible to verify this.
edit: Okay the option for a recovery email could mean that they still have the password (or a key derived of it) on their servers - so basically plain-text.
https://medium.com/@wireapp/making-your-conversations-secure... does not state any information on key management solution: how encryption key is transferred to another device.
But it has links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm which has nothing about cross device key sharing and https://wire.com/resource/Wire%20Security%20Whitepaper/downl.... I've read it through and found nothing on cross-device key sharing as well. Can you point me to the right part?
What I do know is that you don't have access to messages that happened before you first signed in to the device you're using. My message history is complete on the phone I created my Wire account on, but I installed it on a laptop a few days later and as such is missing those first days. Messages get delivered to all your active devices without problem though.
The source code for all their different client varieties (iOS, Android, Web/Electron) and server software can be found here if you're interested [0].