Telegram blows my mind.<p>Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.<p>Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.<p>And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me).<p>Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have.<p>And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)
Many people are asking what are in Telegram that aren’t anywhere else?<p>I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app.<p>- It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly <i>Instant</i> Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).<p>- It is the only app where I add any woman to any group outside of family or other close-knit groups. When creepy dudes get women's cell numbers, it sometimes becomes very difficult for the women to handle. In Telegram, you can be part of large or large-ish groups without the women having to share phone numbers or real names. Blocking is really easy and tension-free.<p>- The video quality in chats is really high. In Android, only Google Duo came close.<p>- ONLY chat app in market with an excellent desktop app for Linux. Also Windows.<p>- I love their non-SJW-everything approach to allowed stickers. Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.<p>- UI/UX is excellent. Really love chat themes and how I can edit them. Many components are customizable. Chat bubble colors, radii of rounded corners, etc.<p>- I like the fine-grained control over notifications from different chats (groups and persons).<p>- I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.<p>- The simple yet effective image editor is nice. So is the text formatting with no fuss.<p>- I often use the auto image resize feature to downscale images.<p>- It is so seamless. It has replaced email when I want to transfer small files to my own devices.<p>- I am a selectively social person. It's good that even with 700 mn people, not many people are in it. The people with whom I don't want to interact more aren’t yet in Telegram. That's an appeal to me.<p>- Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.<p>- SO helped a bunch of HS kids with their Bio study before a big test, the quiz feature was great. SO is not a technical person, and it was easy for her to set up a group, no phone numbers, create quizzes and so on. She loved it.
I went through the entire thread of conversations here, and I am surprised that anything related to Telegram is downvoted and the familiar trope of "security" is added.<p>It's got best-in-class applications with lovely animations. The server now governs reactions to specific messages. Stickers are fun, with premium stickers having additional animations.<p>From a technical perspective, they occupy least space; is "fast" and have a great ecosystem of third party clients. (I use "Owlgram") that offers additional UI elements without cluttering the experience. Tabbed chats are possible now; on Windows desktop, Unigram offers a stellar experience. Threat perceptions or "privacy concerns" are not in the lexicon of ordinary users like me and I am better off without Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp reminds me of what Telegram was 5 years back.<p>I think it is time to reconsider the association of Russia with the application. Criticism is fine, but much of it directed against Telegram appears biased and coloured. I don't work for Telegram, but am a happy user. I couldn't get my folks to understand XMPP or Matrix, or even get my colleagues to switch from any other competing application. This is fine by me.<p>Other finely grained privacy options (ability to control who can call you or add you to groups) are critical for my needs. Yes, it could be better, but no other application offers those controls. Besides, it's easy to chat with others using "usernames" without the hassle of handing out phone numbers.<p>Bravo!
I’ve been using telegram since 2013 every single day. I don’t want my chat app to drain my battery, I don’t want it to waste bandwidth and I want to be able to have so little latency that I feels real-time no matter where I am.<p>Telegram feels like that group of people they warned you about. Sexual and political freedom. Be whatever you want others to see you like. Easy bot API, deep event based td-lib SDK, censorship bypass through MTProto proxies. Delete messages you sent before your crush sees them because you changed your mind. Send messages anonymously in a group if you have multiple admins. Forbid people from clicking your profile when your messages are forwarded. See the people who saw your messages in a group.<p>Telegram feels like the last place where as a European I’m not dealing with US-identity ideology, where I’m not dealing with copyright censorship, where everyone can speak up no matter how normal or insane.<p>In this moment I have 17 bots keeping me up to date with all the things happening, and telegram has essentially become the single stream of news and online social interactions for me.
Looking at the in-app purchase on iOS in Europe, the price seems to be about EUR 5.50 which I find to be quite steep, for these kinds of features. I've been wanting to support TG's development for a while now, but I would have hoped that this would be more in the vicinity of 1-3 Euros per month.
Read the whole post and I have just one small question... where the heck do I sign up? There is no link, no steps to follow, there is no update available for my clients that would perhaps spawn a subscribe button somewhere... how much does premium even cost? I don't get it.<p>I want to buy it, I've been wanting to pay for this service for so long (it just feels so shady this whole time, it's gigabytes of (unencrypted) storage for free? WCPGW), I just can't figure out <i>how to buy this</i>.
I'm happy that Telegram is shaking up the Facebook-dominated messaging and social network space.<p>Also their client apps are open source and have very good Linux support.
After Hangouts died (yeah it's still Google Chat now but it's not the multi-function tool it used to be before they chopped it up to announce a piece is migrating to Chat) I switched to Signal. If I were to do that transition all over again I would do Telegram instead.<p>Signal sounds nice but it's a bit overbearing - backups are somewhere between difficult to impossible depending on the device, there is no web client, and it's only open source in that you can audit source or run your own independent chat network (3rd party clients on the official server are treated as hostile) not as in it's an open community. Despite all of this kind of stuff being defended for contrived hyper-secure hyper-private reasoning you can't send a chat without giving out your phone number and it's ridiculously easy to cause your verification number to change making people numb to all of the protection in the first place.<p>I did grab a Telegram account recently but only since Beeper supported it and I figured "why not" so I'm missing out on these features but I almost wonder if I would have even been so excited about new things like Beeper had I went Telegram originally.<p>Interestingly of all the chat apps WhatsApp and Telegram usage seemed to align heavily. Not sure if that was just a quirk of my friend group or a more general thing.
Convenient and secure/private sometimes pull in opposite directions. That’s why it’s great that we have <i>both</i> Telegram and Signal. I keep mine right next to each other.<p>They’re both great, I plan to support both, they’re just for different things.
So who here is using Telegram and for what? I'm consider myself pretty well connected, but I don't have the app. Tell me what I'm missing.
I had a successful commercial arc completely built on interactions I had on telegram. I built a profitable company and exited all because I decided to download this app 4 years ago.<p>Needless to say I will be paying for their premium services.
Telegram has a very interesting development history. They were nomadic for the early 2010's, eventually landing in Dubai. Apparently this was because they feared being pressured by governments (the CEO and founders are Russian).<p>Is Dubai a place with good protection against government pressure?
Has telegram addressed these concerns? <a href="https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1474067549574688768" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1474067549574688768</a>
Yesterday I chatted in Telegram with my friends about a gadget I was considering to purchase - I’ve got an ad of this gadget in Instagram almost immediately. I couldn’t reproduce it by mentioning some other trendy stuff, but it triggered me anyway. Has anyone experienced the same?
I'm a happy Telegram user, <i>but</i> the features Telegram are introducing with their premium subscription are not particularly compelling, and some of them really seem like anti-features:<p>• 4 GB uploads, faster downloads: I'm struggling to imagine what these would be useful for, other than movie piracy. The default upload limit is already 2 GB, and the download speed is fine.<p>• Doubled limits: Most of these are client-side limits. Locking these features down behind a paywall is just obnoxious.<p>• Voice-to-text: I have never intentionally used Telegram's voice messaging features. Most mobile phones can already do speech-to-text; making other people use a premium feature to get the same results is silly.<p>• Unique stickers, unique reactions: Oh please god no. Animated stickers were bad enough. I'm going to be tempted to ban anyone using these in the groups I moderate.<p>• Chat management: More paywalled client-side features. (Including one feature that was previously available to all users -- auto-archive for new chats used to be offered to any user that was getting a lot of chat requests.)<p>• Animated profile pictures: See "unique stickers".<p>• Premium badges, premium app icons: Yawn.<p>• No ads: Where do ads even show up? I've never seen one, even in large channels.
Improve the ability to search chat history for Asian regional languages, such as Chinese and Japanese
<a href="https://bugs.telegram.org/c/724" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.telegram.org/c/724</a>