Telegram, the popular messenger with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, is inching closer to adopting an ecosystem strategy that is reminiscent
Signal has Stories too, tbh. All apps are beginning to integrate them. Still, they suck.
The worst thing about Telegram was and still is that End to End encryption is a special add on feature and not the default. Group chats aren't secure either. The only reason why Telegram is used as more secure for illegal activities is that it does not cooperate with law enforcement well and has its HQ in Dubai. That does not prevent any hacks or leaks tho.
Plus the bugginess of the new features. Create a group with topics? You'll have a great time...
And a lot of quality of life improvements are still missing. Use more than one client? You don't expect proper sync, do you? True E2EE (secret chats)? Well, no more than one client to begin with. Plus you lose a lot of features. Auto-delte messages? Well, you can, but others can just turn it off. Plus you can't enable or disable it for all chats at once.
What really weirds me out tho is how aggressively they try to make you sync your contacts...
Lucky you, for me they basically ruined group chats completely. I get notifications for the wrong topic. Reply to a notification, you might end up posting in a couple ones. The client will sometimes jump to the very beginning of the chat history. Sometimes I don't get notifications for a topic, sometimes old messages appear as new ones.