I'll add:

- Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number

- Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram.

I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.

Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years

But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.

Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.

Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity.

Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy.

Pray there will never be a telegram.zip torrent.

I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?

Probably still doesn't beat ripcord