And then I am looking at telegram - everything is polished, many smart and useful functionality is included. The design is outstanding, the updates seem to add useful stuff.
Can someone explain to me why Signal is so very bad compared to telegram?
That's technically not true - it's not end-to-end-encrypted by default.
But yes, it is a design choice - telegram puts usability first - see all their innovations with large groups, stickers etc -, even at the expense of some privacy (i.e. no e2e-chats). But that's why you can have Telegram open on every device you own and probably why they are the second largest chat app by now.
Signal, on the other hand, values privacy first, everything else second. This is why this bug is open for 6 months - they see your chat log as a convenience feature and mostly a burden. In addition, Signal is a smaller team with less funding, so that their UI is not as polished is partially also due to lacking manpower, but its simply not a priority for them.
Other apps may provide higher anonymity, but none provide privacy guarantees higher than (or even close to) Signal.
So, being "best" at privacy is meaningless unless you are in the very lucky position that your local jurisdiction fits Signal's threat model. There aren't many in the west even...
Signal has taken measures to limit its ability to know who I'm sending and receiving messages from. Though it's still possible by mapping my IP address to me. So yes there is still a centralized metadata problem, but I'm not letting perfect stand in the way of better.
Not in most cases, for most people, most of the time. Everyone knows you communicate with your family, friends and business associates. Very few people communicate out of those groups and even if they do they rarely have to worry about anyone finding out about it.
- Using phone numbers means that Signal can constantly check against your contacts to let you know if any of your contacts are now using Signal. As such, using phone numbers encourages use of Signal.
- The usage of phone numbers instead of email or usernames also helps combat temporary/fake account creation abuse, as phone numbers are KYC if you ban VoIP numbers
That said, in the end it is a compromise on privacy and anonymity to increase the popularity and stability of the app.
I'm more concerned about every day privacy, and Telegram is far better on them. Do you realized that you sent by mistake some data to the wrong people? In Telegram you can delete or edit every messages you want whenever you want.
Don't you want to share your phone number in a group? In Telegram your phone number is hidden by default, meaning that other group members doesn't see you number unless you share it with them.
Also Signal is open source but not really open. In Telegram you can use whatever client you want, in Signal you are forbidden to use anything else than the official client. And the official client is open source, but it depends on proprietary services, like the Google Play services on Android, so you really can't use it on a 100% open source system. You can't even find online the Signal apk by their choice, so the only official way is to install it from the Google Play Store (and how do you verify that the apk that Google provided to you doesn't contain a backdoor?)
For a lot of people, that's exactly the concern.
> Also Signal is open source but not really open. In Telegram you can use whatever client you want, in Signal you are forbidden to use anything else than the official client.
There's nothing in open source that requires people running services to allow anyone to connect to it however they like. You still have the freedom to inspect, modify, run and distribute both the server and client, so it's to see what part of that in "not really open".
> And the official client is open source, but it depends on proprietary services, like the Google Play services on Android, so you really can't use it on a 100% open source system.
I agree, this is annoying. But it depends on your threat model and it seems that most people don't see Google as the threat to protect against.
> You can't even find online the Signal apk by their choice, so the only official way is to install it from the Google Play Store
https://signal.org/android/apk/
> (and how do you verify that the apk that Google provided to you doesn't contain a backdoor?)
>In Telegram you can delete or edit every messages you want whenever you want...
Remember the furore when Amazon were caught deleting books off people's Kindles? Everyone was rightly outraged by that. Yet so many people think it's a great idea that Telegram allows other people to arbitrarily delete content from your devices.
- macOS client: https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/graphs/contributor.... Written almost single handedly by one developer.
- Telegram Desktop: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/graphs/contribut.... Written almost single handedly by one developer, who also wrote almost all of the supporting Qt code.
Updates have been meaningful and minimal.
Can't say I'd be happy if it started adding a bunch of features I didn't ask for.
Opinions may differ here. Their sticker packs feature added at least 50 MB (mostly via node_modules): https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/3919
> Can't say I'd be happy if it started adding a bunch of features I didn't ask for.
What features do you mean here? The GitHub issue is a bug report and not a feature request. However, there are two features that could help: Backups (export and import functionality) and syncing older messages from the phone during the initial setup. Both of these features can be fully optional and shouldn't require much code.
And they do regularly add new features (that I didn't ask for but I get why) anyway: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/releases
The Signal desktop app is Electron, where as Telegram is native. That's why and it's that simple.
Most importantly, it's bad at protecting my privacy. You can't show any message to anyone on your screen or have someone look over your shoulder unless you want them to see who you recently communicated with in what order as well as the start of the most recent messages.
Thanks for mentioning that. I always wondered why there's no option to at least hide the most recent messages and dates (or temporarily hide the whole sidebar). I guess most people are either fine with it or use their phone instead (and using Signal-Desktop in public / when someone's looking is probably uncommon). It seems like at least Telegram-Desktop has this issue as well (not sure if there's an option for it).
Anyway, a slight modification to the UI to hide/minimize the sidebar would be something I'd appreciate for those rare situations.
Native: https://macos.telegram.org/
Qt client: https://desktop.telegram.org/
In addition, there’s a libpurple plugin should one want to use Telegram with Pidgin, as well as several other clients including one that’s TUI based.
The choice of client is a massive boon. It’s unfortunate that one can’t use a alternative Signal clients, because they’d likely solve many of the gripes people have with Signal.
There are many really good Electron applications, Visual Studio Code being one of them.