I won't touch signal because I care about user freedom more than privacy. (Both are important)
No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.
No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.
Note that since a while there is also the possibility of using web sockets. But they are an extreme battery drain, and thus google services are quasi-mandatory. Telegram solves this without being a battery drain, possibly at the cost of delivering messages with a delay, but why isn't that my choice.
Whenever a few of us are sitting around in real life, and someone sends something to a group chat, all the phones on the table will buzz instantly together (iOS and Android).
And on top of that, battery usage is really low on Android. I use it a TON, and it's never in the top n apps of battery usage. Meanwhile, I can just open Snapchat once, and I lose a few percent.
That’s really a mark of Snapchat’s incompetence rather than Telegram’s adroitness.
I suspected that Signal basically took Over Gapps's role since it's the only app I use with notifications. Google keeps open a single optimized connection and apps go through it instead of having 10 open connections. After deleting Gapps, Signal is the only app keeping open a connection so it basically has the same impact.
But then I installed WhatsApp and Signal+WA both work perfectly without Gapps and with no gigantic battery drain. So I have no idea what black magic is making this work.
I just looked up my battery stats; since the last full charge 32 hours ago Signal has used 1% of the power. I got a few notifications and used the app for a few minutes in this time. WhatsApp's power usage is too low to show up in the stats.
It requires a phone number, but it has iPad, Windows, macOS and Linux apps that function dependently of the mobile device once set up.