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Comment by RDaneelOlivaw | Hacker News Reader

I've not found textsecure to be buggy at all, can you explain your experience a bit more? My friends and I switched to it from surespot and love it. Its also a killer feature that it handles standard SMS as well. A single app for all messaging.

Also, wasn't telegram demonstrated to have awful crypto? Like basically pointless to use from an encryption standpoint?

I'm keeping an eye on the forthcoming Hemlis messenger which should have good crypto and launch on iOS/android and from the demo videos it has an awesome ui. However they're taking forever to launch the thing so who knows when it'll be out. Also it will need to be open sourced and audited before I trust it.

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It suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, stops working until it is reinstalled. Messages are marked as being successfully sent, but they're not being received by the recipient. All my friends have the same issue.

Since it's only on Android I can't use it as the single app for all messaging. I certainly type much faster on my desktop keyboard than I do on my cell phone, so I need something with desktop support too. A lot of my friends also have iOS, which also is an issue.

Telegram's crypto is pretty weird, and potentially insecure - no doubt. However, it's the only messaging app I've found with good clients (superb in fact) on all platforms that has some level of encryption. I don't "need" (although I would certainly prefer) to be protected from targeted attacks, I need to be protected from mass surveillance.

We've noticed that some people have problems when they do weird stuff to their phones. We use GCM for delivery, so that can stop working with a custom gapps install, or a rooted firewall setup, or disabled background data for gcm. We have yet to receive a report where GCM stops working for people with completely stock installs. If that doesn't describe you, please file a bug so that we can help get things working.

For what it's worth, TextSecure also has delivery receipts now, so the sender can see what's happening with their message.

Just for the sake of having balanced anecdotes here for people who might be considering the switch to TS:

I recently started using TextSecure on my janky, crappy old Android phone and it is a _dream_. So far it has been strictly better that the native Android text app in every respect. The user experience is so different it's like night and day. Faster, lighter, quicker to load, better at sending messages while I'm in the subway with low signal, lets me keep typing the next text reliably while the old one is starting to send, etc. I could go on and on. I would use it just for the UX alone, even absent crypto.

I'm not in any way affiliated with TextSecure and frankly disagree quite strongly with some of Moxie's politics, but credit where credit is due. +1 very satisfied user.

Hmmm, I have not experienced these disappearing messages, although, maybe I have and I don't know it. I wouldn't know if one of my messages didn't go through to the other party would I? I will have to check with my friends and compare their message history to mine next time I see one of them.

Also, yeah I am desperately waiting on a secure messaging app that is has good crypto, ios/android, AND desktop support. So far there isn't one that fills all those, so for now I'll settle for good crypto rather than platform support. From what I understand, multiple logins from devices using the same identity is really hard for good crypto? I'm not sure but that'd explain why all the top secure messaging apps don't do it. yet.

Being open source and audited also matters a lot to me.

It's inconvenient to use Telegram on many devices (e.g. desktop/mobile), because their "secret chats" are not synchronized between them (e.g. your friends have to keep two contacts "kristofferR – Mobile" and "kristofferR — Desktop", right?).

If you are not using "secret chats", their default chats are not end-to-end encrypted, so are not comparable to TextSecure.

> Since it's only on Android I can't use it as the single app for all messaging.

messaging is expected to be rolled into the Signal iOS app quite soon, as I understand it

It's been just soon for quite some time now.

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-iOS

+1 on the message loss issues. Even got to the point where I would lose incoming messages if I didn't catch them on the notification screen.

> I've not found textsecure to be buggy at all

I've had all sorts of issues with the push messaging causing some crazy infuriating problems... had to disable it on my end and on friends phones too. Also had some oddness where two friends with identical handsets - one couldn't set TextSecure as the incoming SMS client even though the other could...

It's great, I rave about it and try and talk everyone I know into using it, but there are some odd issues occasionally...

My uneducated opinion is that this has to do with all the junk layered on top of Android by the phone manufacturer. I've got a Nexus 4 (old flagship, vanilla Android) and TextSecure has not given me an iota of trouble.

I tend to agree. My vanilla nexus devices haven't had any problems at all (except for the push bits)... In fact, virgin android in general is extremely swish and pleasant to use.

Disclaimer: not a cryptographer by any means.

I think "basically pointless" is when there's a known vulnerability that renders the encryption pointless. I think Telegram's more like "bad-smelling and while no exact vulnerabilities are known (since no one cared to audit), it's probably dangerous."

Just trying to be fair.

I think you're probably right there. Here are moxie's comments on it: http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/

And here's a thorough trashing of their crypto: http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypta...

I'm not a cryptographer either, so I can't comment on how accurate that last link is, but I tend to trust moxie, and if he thinks it stinks, well.....

The constant silent failure to either send or receive texts. I can send my father textsecure messages but any he sends to me disappear in the ether somewhere

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