[crossroadsguy]

I’m back to WhatsApp after many months of full time Signal usage. People started leaving Signal one by one. Some of them really tried. Not many had joined anyway. For most remaining contacts Signal was and for more it remained installed just for me.

A medical emergency in the family and I was back on WhatsApp in a second.

Signal kept crashing, remained full of UI bugs (the kind I just couldn’t believe is there has been there for months and years; yeah the simple and silly ones), functionality bugs, slightly better than barely useable calling, delayed messages, broken notifications, extremely frustrating and broken encryption key update even when there was no such actual update — while the foundation kept giving us new emojis/stickers and worked on crypto. Nice gesture I reckon. And yeah, still a closed garden.

No opinion really. It’s just how it is. I use Apple’s phone and computer which is proprietary and closed garden by design, effort, and lobbying. Who am I kidding.

So no, I’m not going to say Telegram is shady. Maybe it is but so are others. Maybe not Signal (or is it?). It’s just that Telegram is far from being the personal messaging/communication app, at least around me. It’s an extension of other online communities like subreddits. Discord is eating into that share anyway. It’s used for apartment groups. COVID update channels (especially in India where very high up offices still have public Gmail IDs) and all that. Oh, they do have literally the best mobile and desktop apps among its peers. By many miles.