I hope telegram knows the main reason that I and many other people use Telegram is because it doesn't have social media features like a feed. Now that they've finished creating the "perfect" messenger, every update looks more and more concerning as my favorite messaging app begins to look more and more like facebook.
I completely get your fear as I also don't really want non-chat features from Telegram, but I can pretty confidently say I don't think any of the new features have at all changed how I use the app. my chats work exactly like I expect them to with my friends and that's perfect. I don't see any of the more social media stuff unless I want to.
I think it's a pretty good sign that all these social media features continue to be added and I still don't see any impact on how I use Telegram.
In general, app feature creep is becoming increasingly tiresome. It’s sometimes ok for software to be “done”, with any further engineering instead going towards making the product ever-more rock solid. Nobody seems to realize this though.
I think Telegram has realised they've lost the 1 on 1 personal chat fight to Signal and they're pivoting to their emergent user base. Every time I hear about Telegram these days it's in a discussion about thousand-person broadcast chats and the like. If that is truly their main area of growth a feed to aggregate that kind of stuff does make sense.
Doesn't Telegram have like 10x the number of users that Signal has? Even if channels are popular I would imagine there's plenty of 1-1 and personal usage on Telegram. Data point of one: I use Telegram with about 20 contacts for personal messaging; I don't use Signal with anyone.
Signal had a ton of users but then they disabled the ability to use it as your primary SMS app citing user confusion about which chats were encrypted vs which were not, SMS support was the killer feature for a lot of people. Since they dropped true SMS support I don't know anyone who still uses it.
Maybe in some countries they have lost the fight. But in many other countries, including India, Signal isn't even a part of the fight.
I know fewer than 5 people who have heard of Signal but almost all of my acquaintances have at least heard of Telegram. But nobody uses anything except WhatsApp.
FYI, Telegram is currently one of the main social media platforms in Russia, which is their "domestic" market (the company is not legally in Russia, as well as it's developers and founder, but all of them are originally from the country).
It is the opposite for me. I use many decentralized E2EE messengers. Telegram is good for broadcasting certain topics such as war coverage, because it is not domiciled in a NATO country.
They probably don't make enough money from being a reasonable platform. It will just end up a Twitter hell-scape if trolls can find a community to torment/destroy more easily.
Meh, like it or not (I can guess which), Telegram has the best API in the game and it's amazing for businesses and all sorts of use-cases beyond chatting 1:1 with your friends. For example, its API lets you create buttons and nested applications within the app which certainly aren't there for you to talk with Billy from work.
So it makes sense that they build out more features for those use-cases like those using it as a media platform. I really like what they're doing. This is how you build a platform.
I'd be surprised if HNers are even aware of how other people use Telegram beyond basic chat. We tend to dismiss and hold disdain for use-cases we don't care about rather than learn about them earnestly.
Telegram is what software should be. Silicon Valley companies should learn a lot of things from them. How to build great features with great UX, branding and most important blazing fast performance. Our apps are so clunky in comparison.
I disagree. Telegram is wonky and filled with bugs and weird UX decisions. It's a prime example of a platform that is just "good enough" but has no polish and added value.
How surprising, I love using Telegram specifically because it feels so stable & polished across multiple platforms (including Linux). In fact , the UI/UX is so straightforward I was even able to successfully transition my friends and family to it and finally escape the tyranny of iMessage. What do you recommend as an alternative?
I've been using it since Meta acquired WhatsApp. Always on a shitty £300-tops Android phone and I have never experienced any bugs, or lag, or wonkyness... The UX is simply perfect. Especially compared to WhatsApp, which I now have to use because "the rest of the office uses it"...
What is 'shitty' about a '£300-tops Android phone'? I never paid more than ~€200 for a new phone, my current 'daily' phone is a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 pro from 2018 (running a de-fanged Google-free Android distribution) which still runs 2-3 days on a single charge and runs all apps I care to use. I don't consider this a 'shitty' phone in any way.
> Telegram is what software should be. Silicon Valley companies should learn a lot of things from them. How to build great features with great UX, branding and most important blazing fast performance.
What? I'm surprised of the positive feedback I'm seeing in the comments. To me (and to my bubble, comprised of mostly Eastern European devs) Telegram feels (and always felt) like hot garbage. Not sure exactly what Silicon Valley needs to learn from it, I think we've nailed down the recipe for shitty apps.
Insanely so. Only Apple comes close from a “pleasurable” and physically snappy pov. A bit of an apples-oranges comparison, but still. Discord as well I guess but it’s nothing like telegram.
Telegram has this strong old-school “app-feel” in a world where everything else feels like an eventual consistency web app with 2 spinners going off at once for simple interactions (thin client with cloud-based source of truth). The details put in to even tiny things like transitions are well thought through, and they almost never feel intrusive or distracting. State is always fresh and no reloading is necessary.
Not saying I love everything about telegram, but their UX truly stands out, surprisingly even against big and well funded players like messenger.
I think the main differentiator is that Telegram prioritizes responsiveness and feeling of “solidness” (no blinking frames when loading and the like) in a world where those things are usually written off as unavoidable casualties.
It’s similar to the difference between physical products that feel well-considered and well built vs. creaky hollow glossy black plastic Walmart fare.
Yeah I guess the bar is pretty low these days. The UX is very confusing indeed but it is nice looking, snappy and has reduced visual clutter compared to similar apps, imo.
>To make discovering channels easier, when you join a channel, you'll now see a list of similar public channels.
There's no channel browser, but there's a similarity recommendation system? It seems a bit backwards. Right now channels are impossible to find without going through a third party site.
The main reason i started using telegram was that it seems to be the only messenger that allows moving devices between android and ios as needed. Whatsapp and signal, basically lock you into one platform without any option to export or move accounts, which is really bewildering to me. (and no the whatsapp export feature is a scam to counter EU law but it does not work and the migrate to ios feature only works when whiping the ios device) But i have to say i am really amazed how great the app feels and works. Even stupid features like stickers that i never thought about before are so good i use them.
Signal will let you export but not choose where to export to, so if you're running out of space on your phone and add an SD card to back up your signal database or export media, tough luck because the output destination is hardcoded. For your security, of course.
"Signal Export" is account metadata without messages and images! And the backup is encrypted, you need some third party tool to decrypt it and that does not work for me and i would not consider a company satisfying data portability laws if the export depends on compiling c++ from a third party. And if you just want to move your signal account from android to ios that wont help you either as its not possible to restore and android backup to an ios signal app.
I don't use the "social media" features either. I just use it for messaging. I'm fine with it if the social media features stay out of my way, but based on experience this will not be the case.
That would surprise me. WhatsApp lags behind, in many ways now. (but I actually have Telegram only on the desktop as it is too distracting on the mobile)
In 2019, the official Telegram client didn't have chat folders so I was using a Telegram client made by an Iranian dude (Telegram was extremely popular in Iran and Iranian clients were the most feature-rich).
Signal doesn't have a proper backup/migration mechanism yet when adding new devices.... Whatsapp is more complete. Idk, maybe Element too but haven't used it recently
>Not to mention the app is a buggy mess. At least on iphone.
If you think it's buggy on iPhone you have no idea what's going on on Android. The iOS venison is actaully the "polished " one as Signal devs daily drive iPhones.
Have someone call you on Signal. Missed calls galore. Also texts. It just dozez all the time (despite having been configured in Android to not let it sleep) and texts come late and calls get missed.
It doesn't "doze all the time" here, seems like you're blaming Signal when it's your phone's power management software not working as described.
The only people I know that have this kind of issue with Signal are all on Huawei phones, we've configured them and it's worked for a while but Huawei only seem to care about letting Facebook/Whatsapp/Teitter/etc.. run properly.
A bit of it. But it is besides the point: A messenger, that is working reliable and intentionally designed for the masses - does not come with the need, to fiddle with configs, to get basic functionality working.
I do not like Meta, but I never experienced with whatsapp, that someone send a message and this message just vanishes, so the sender thinks he is getting ignored. But exactly this happened way too often with signal.
But it's not fiddling with Signal configs, it's un-breaking the broken power management software phone manufacturers add on top of AOSP. This issue is not specific to Signal and if it were in their power to code around it, they would. Other apps get affected in the same way.
Whatsapp, being so popular, gets whitelisted. It has to work or people would be telling each other "don't buy Samsung!" (not unlike the situation with Huawai since the Play store got removed from their phones).
Messages getting lost entirely is a whole separate matter - so you got the two ticks telling you it'd been delivered, but nothing at the recipient's end? Was this a long time ago? I would stop using it too if I had that problem, I agree.
"Messages getting lost entirely is a whole separate matter - so you got the two ticks telling you it'd been delivered, but nothing at the recipient's end? Was this a long time ago? I would stop using it too if I had that problem, I agree."
This is the matter I am mostly talking about. Everything else is annyance.
As far as I remember, it was mostly only 1 tick, but likely also an instance with 2 ticks (grey) - but no trace ever on the recipent.
It happened often during the peak of new users coming to signal, with the latest whatsapp drama ( I use signal since the beginning), but since then not that I am aware off. But it did erode trust for me and others, so I cannot safely recommend it anymore.
Like the other poster mentionied, you might have missed, that you missed things. It is sadly unreliable for me, too, which is just unacceptable with a messenger.
I wish they'd fix that bug where Telegram Mac tries to apply app updates and gets stuck and you miss messages. But no clearly it's more important to force feed nasty social crap into people's eyeballs.
