And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features into such amazing UI. And then I'm looking at other alternatives, from naked WhatsApp over laggy wechat to horrible UX in signal.
What's the reason for telegram amazing performance and features?
It's still impressive, though. It's not as if Facebook's chat works this well and that isn't (wasn't?) encrypted either and they've got an even bigger pile of cash. It's also a lot older though, just look at the evolution from IRC to MSN to Facebook to Telegram: each step it gets better. Maybe that's how that difference can be explained? Anyway, between normal messengers like Signal/Whatsapp/Wire/etc. and Telegram, the main difference is not caring about privacy. (To be clear, I don't mean that whatsapp is a privacy-conscious messenger as they will collect what they want behind the scenes, but on the client side they have to care about keeping the server "untrusted" and that will slow everything down a lot.)
What I think you're underappreciating is that Telegram was built on the premise of privacy and they've neglected that from day one. It was better than the status quo on day one (at release), but have fallen further and further behind ever since.
Telegram was launched when Whatsapp sent messages without transport encryption over port 443 (this was fun on public wifi!) and got big when Whatsapp was bought by Facebook because Telegram was independent and had proper end to end encryption (with air quotes around "proper" if you like; it wasn't OTR-grade but at least it was better than the status quo). Since then, nothing happened whatsoever on the privacy front. Even the legal compliance is a complete joke (gdpr data exports only work in a few clients and not very well at that), but more importantly to me, they need gdpr data exports because the servers still know everything. Whatsapp moved on, Signal got a lot more mature, Wire has also come onto the playing field, and Telegram has done nothing since before Snowden told us to turn on https basically.
Telegram is still at "open a secret chat" with worst UX
But definitely
I switched to Matrix though
There has been a lot of work on it but the smart thing to do would have been to copy Wire or Signal and build on an existing thing if you don't have the manpower to start from scratch and want to be a mainstream alternative.
I'd rather recommend Threema (best UX, not so great in features or encryption tech), Signal (network effect, best privacy, reasonable UX), or Wire (like Signal but slightly better desktop experience).
I started pulling people to it only a few months ago when I thought it was good enough (includes almost no encryption issues happening in all day usage)
My mom uses it as well. It works fine. I had to install the app though, like all the other apps.
The reasons why I found Matrix interesting, were:
- Telegram like syncing messages across all devices while adding a new device is as simple as setting up WhatsApp Web
- It's a standard for interoperability - I got sick of telling others what to use and being told so by the network effect
Copying Wire or Signal just wouldn't work for technical reasons. I also wouldn't want a copy.
I got all of your recommendations over time (including buying Threema with all my friends), but they just haven't been good enough for us and me. In practice, no one cares about Electron. It seldomly VScode or Teams are used at work
That's hyperbole and I think you know it. It's not like the messages are sent unencrypted for anyone to sniff with minimal effort.
Meanwhile I'm just here thinking, what's the matter if you're messager is super duper safe if your device OS running them is plagged with backdoors?
> what [if your] mess[en]ger is super duper safe if your device OS running them is plag[u]ed with backdoors
This is more relevant. Bugdoors more than backdoors, or perhaps just stupid bugs and enough budget to find them, but yeah basically that's how messages are decrypted these days (e.g. NSO group).
For example, people have been using Russian GOST algorithms as a hedge against the USA stuff, but it's falling out of style because it just hasn't proven necessary in the decades since the AES and SHA families came into existence. Any bugs we found, for example in SHA-1, affected everyone equally and did not create a backdoor as with Dual-EC (in which flaws were identified before release and which went unaddressed, very much unlike other common algorithms).
Also note that it's not impossible. Wire and Signal have come a very long way already, it's just the front-end (UX) that they're lacking on really. Telegram has features like a video editor and user-filtered search, but those are all client-side things and have nothing to do with e2e encryption. All the things that do (sending messages, emoji reactions, group chats, group video calls, etc.) are already implemented by both apps.
Wouldn't a better question be "what's the reason for other apps having crappy performance and subpar features"?
At this point, I just think the answer is top notch developers and designers with an impressive alignment about what the product should be.
I know no other free application with such an amazing usability. There must be some shitload of money behind them, for sure.
I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is that they’re misusing Google APIs to avoid paying for the proper way of doing things.
This feature will break as soon as Google throws up a captcha, because these endpoints aren’t intended to be used programmatically.
> And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features into such amazing UI.
The translate functionality comes from Google. They’re just sending messages to Google and getting a result back, at least until Google detects the API misuse and breaks the response.