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Comment by yewenjie | Hacker News Reader

Telegram is getting so many cool features that I really wonder how long can it sustain being ad-free and user-centric.

It has already been announced that they will add ads to Telegram but only to public groups/channels over a certain amount of users. Everything else will stay ad free. See: https://t.me/durov/142

They have 1 billion dollar[1], and working on ads[2]

[1] https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2BF0UP

[2] https://t.me/durov/142

Exactly. It recently got a feature that totally obliterates Clubhouse out of the Pacific ocean.

At this point Telegram is unrivalled and already has almost everything that WhatApp has, except for E2EE turned on by default.

Exactly. WhatsApp has everything that Telegram has and they look up to them for "inspiration".

Except for the huge red flag that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.

WhatsApp is hooked up to the surveillance machine of Facebook. No matter how they try to spin the nonsense that they are not siamese twins are perhaps two different versions of the business, its not going to change the fact that Zuckerberg was spouting for charity. How they ferret the data out of WhatsApp is a mystery to me.

It's just not a red flag. It's a minefield.

I feel like Clubhouse looks a lot more polished as an app though. Telegram feels like a CS 101 "hello world" messenger app demo. Yeah I know it has more features than that, but it looks like it has no features.

When you go into Clubhouse you know you're in Clubhouse. They don't need to write "Clubhouse" at the top of the app. There are no generic buttons such as hamburger buttons. It's obvious which account you're logged into just by looking at the icon at the top right. Almost every use has a profile pic. There is attention to negative space and typography.

I've never used Clubhouse, but on iOS and macOS Telegram looks and feels very native.. but better. Snappier, faster, more responsive, yet still looks correct, and works as I expect native apps to work.

The thing is though, apps that look native often look like they were made by beginners. The native look on both iOS and Android is also starting to look dated in terms of graphic design.

Most popular apps don't use native design but rather artistically always a step ahead of native. Think of e.g. the Airbnb, Uber, Slack, Discord, Instagram apps.

If Instagram or Airbnb used native iOS/Android design they'd lose users pretty quickly IMO.

Of all those, I have tried Discord and Slack, and I had a really, really horrible time. Neither are things I intend to use of my own volition, and am inclined to argue against using if I have a say.

Drag and drop, text inputs, selections, UI elements, keyboard shortcuts, state preservation – none of those worked as they should. I would accept a divergence for a legitimate improvement, but it's just system-wide basic functionality missing.

All of that works correctly in Telegram. There is great value in adhering to the system conventions, design, and using native elements – it's fairly clear what is supposed to be what, a good chunk of the time, and there is minimal context switching as I use other native apps.

> If Instagram or Airbnb used native iOS/Android design they'd lose users pretty quickly IMO.

Those are services.. where would people go to replace Instagram? Twitter? Airbnb, what other big service has brand mindshare that people know about for fly-by-night unregulated sleeping accomodations?

I don't think iOS/Android design would cause them to lose or gain users.

What I care about most is speed/latency.

Uber and Slack look nice but they're rather slow. After a week, the "looks nice" part ceases to matter and all that's left is the annoyance of waiting 200ms-1000ms between every action.

I agree with that, but also 99% sure the latency in those apps have nothing to do with their graphic design and more to do with these apps waiting for an API roundtrip response before updating the UI, and possibly lots of analytics bloat.

As long as the Russian government is able to keep funding it? :)

I believe the owner/founder was kicked out of Russia. It was also banned in Russia for a while, at least they tried banning it.

Can you please at least read the first paragraph of wikipedia before making allegations? Russian government hates telegram with a passion

Telegram is free. Who pays for it and why?

Any strong evidence of this? I mean actual links or investigations proving that?

Or are you deliberately spreading unsubstantiated claims?

Strong evidence? Good luck with that. However, if a service costs millions per month to even exist and yet it is free to use, something does not add up. Or do you honestly believe that there is such thing as “free lunch”?

Be nice if Americans could make something this good again. Have you seen WhatsApp lately? It's a pure travesty.

They already have and it is called Quill. [0]

Works on web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and already looks promising to be the diamond standard of chat software and compete against the alternatives.

Impressive piece of extremely high quality software so rare in this software industry.

[0] https://quill.chat

Holy s*t this looks amazing. Our (multi-disciplinary) team has been struggling with Zulip, which adopts the threaded messaging paradigm we need, but has a face only an engineer could love. This looks like it could be a drop-in replacement without the UX quirks.

Thanks for the rec.

Is it? Granted, I've only been using it for three years but... its hasn't really changed that whole time? It's fine?

I like whatsapp a lot, personally. The stickers aren't as good as Telegram, though.

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