Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
Signal - Featureless
Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption
Wire - Really liked Wire, but it had a bug of not doing push notifications correctly. Many missed messages until opening the app manually and seeing them.
Viber - No real complaint with Viber I guess, I don't quite remember why I didn't like it.
LINE - This is what I settled on. Nice interface, customizable, same encryption as WhatsApp/Signal/etc, voice and video also encrypted E2E, everything worked flawlessly. I wish more Americans used it.
In the end, LINE was the winner. That said, if Wire were to fix the issues I had with them, I would choose it instead. I really like the fact that you can use multiple devices with Wire, which is the only one that let's you do that.
LINE I've not heard of. Play store says it contains adverts and IAP. Is the 'lite' version good enough (it doesn't mention ads)?
Come now. Signal has group chats, document sharing, built-in GIF searching (GIPHY), disappearing messages, encrypted calling (video and/or voice), oh and the most important feature: text messaging.
Who pays for it? (Honest question, I burned myself on WhatsApp.)
While Telegram annoy me more and more by some of their crypto moves
this just isn't true
and we should stop spreading this lie.
Please help me stop this idea that only E2E is crypto.
For examples of not encrypted data, look at telnet and plain http, they are unencrypted protocols and anyone can read the content as it passes over their network.
> ...
> Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption
Here's what I see.
Encrypted by default seems to be what you wrote, not e2e.
There's enough problems with Telegram that we don't need to lie to create new ones ;-)
It's progressing rapidly. Cisco, Google, Facebook & others participating.
I think you need to justify your statement a bit more, as right now, it amounts to baseless speculation.
Apple's entire ecosystem is designed with privacy in mind, and they've consistently doubled down on it every time. Consider the Secure Enclave - Apple would be able to profit quite a bit if they harvested their users' data, but they have long since made the choice to encrypt it with a per-device key that is effectively impossible to extract.
Combined with their spats with the government to avoid decrypting or introducing backdoors, I think you would be very hard-pressed to find a company or culture that values user privacy more than Apple.
This isn't something they've done because Siri was falling behind. This is what caused Siri to fall behind.
But it's not an option for the fast-pace, short-text, short-lived communication, thread style conversations. No, Gmail lock-in is not an option.
- no presence or typing indicators
- no working end to end encryption, definitely so for group threads
- no reasonable concept of managing groups
- no standard way of quoting
- inefficient or unsafe media sharing
- insane amounts of spam
- no lightweight formatting
- no avatars
And that's just what randomly came to mind.
E-mail sucks for almost anything.
Ever tried sending a message that's several pages long on anything but email? Go ahead, do it. See how <your preferred messenger> hits the ground face down on that.
Even your short comment is too long to be comfortably read in most IM apps.
>- no standard way of quoting
Using > is a de-facto standard. Now, I know, you have objections. Before you voice them, try receiving a long message in your IM of choice, and try writing a response quoting parts of the long message you just got. Could you manage to do it in a single message? Ah.
Some of use like to write, you know. And email is good for that.
Almost anything else sucks.
> Some of use like to write, you know.
/r/iamverysmart . Some of us like to write short messages quickly, you know. With read receipts and push notifications.