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By building a phenomenal chat app and gradually (deliberately) building features around it to create a complete WeChat-like ecosystem, Telegram will probably im

By building a phenomenal chat app and gradually (deliberately) building features around it to create a complete WeChat-like ecosystem, Telegram will probably improve people's uptake of chat-centric utilities in the markets they're targeting. I think the fundamental component to their success is just how snappy and 'live' their chat conversations feel. Everything including their backend perf, chat bubble animations, etc seems to be finely tuned to make conversations feel alive and active.

blauditore 9y ago
It is super performant and stable though. I'm often surprized how easily it works through a shaky slow connection while others end up in an endless loading icon.
jcelerier 9y ago
and then they say that Qt isn't able to do pretty animations :p
- distances 9y ago
  Who says? I've never heard this.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    just look in other threads about qt on this website or proggit :p
welder 9y ago
I wish Keybase Chat supported mobile. https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-chat https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-chat
- anubisresources 9y ago
  Keybase chat does support mobile, I use it all the time
- jasikpark 9y ago
  Keybase chat works with both direct messages and team messages on mobile
- X-Istence 9y ago
  Using it on iOS without issues.
- dharma1 9y ago
  Works fine on mobile. Can't say the UX is as good as Telegram though
on_and_off 9y ago
Interesting that the official Telegram client gets mocked a lot for how bloated its code is. And it absolutely is, from a 2 minutes look at their code : - their chat activity is 12000 lines of code : https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/ChatActivity.java https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... - it looks like they have copy pasted tons of Android library like exoplayer directly in their repo It does work very well though ! I guess that they have an extremely small team (or just one persone) and it is their first Android project. It looks like they have acqui-hired a competing chat client (Telegram X), so it looks like they have a solution to clean this mess.
- d33 9y ago
  That sounds like a disturbingly huge attack surface...
- dmix 9y ago
  Woah, that's some lazy code in ChatActivity.java. Functions with 30+ conditionals depending on tons of external state. That must be a nightmare to debug and impossible to test. I've seen some huge Android java functions where everything gets stuffed into the Fragment creation/update/etc API functions... but this is one just stuffed everything in them. It's just asking for bugs and security issues. Edit: the commit history all comes the same developer, each titled with a generic "Bug fixes" commit and no description of the changes. Seems like a single guy is just cowboying the whole App, it's not a team project at Telegram. Which explains the above... https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/ChatActivity.java https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master/TMessagesPr...
  - solarkraft 9y ago
    However it feels very good to use. Cases in which something gets weirdly stuck (happens in other apps) are virtually non existent. It is fast and quite reliable. Perhaps surprisingly so.
    - 9y ago

blauditore 9y ago

It is super performant and stable though. I'm often surprized how easily it works through a shaky slow connection while others end up in an endless loading icon.

jcelerier 9y ago

and then they say that Qt isn't able to do pretty animations :p

distances 9y ago
Who says? I've never heard this.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  just look in other threads about qt on this website or proggit :p

welder 9y ago

I wish Keybase Chat supported mobile. https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-chat https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-chat

anubisresources 9y ago
Keybase chat does support mobile, I use it all the time
jasikpark 9y ago
Keybase chat works with both direct messages and team messages on mobile
X-Istence 9y ago
Using it on iOS without issues.
dharma1 9y ago
Works fine on mobile. Can't say the UX is as good as Telegram though

on_and_off 9y ago

Interesting that the official Telegram client gets mocked a lot for how bloated its code is. And it absolutely is, from a 2 minutes look at their code : - their chat activity is 12000 lines of code : https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/ChatActivity.java https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... - it looks like they have copy pasted tons of Android library like exoplayer directly in their repo It does work very well though ! I guess that they have an extremely small team (or just one persone) and it is their first Android project. It looks like they have acqui-hired a competing chat client (Telegram X), so it looks like they have a solution to clean this mess.

d33 9y ago
That sounds like a disturbingly huge attack surface...
dmix 9y ago
Woah, that's some lazy code in ChatActivity.java. Functions with 30+ conditionals depending on tons of external state. That must be a nightmare to debug and impossible to test. I've seen some huge Android java functions where everything gets stuffed into the Fragment creation/update/etc API functions... but this is one just stuffed everything in them. It's just asking for bugs and security issues. Edit: the commit history all comes the same developer, each titled with a generic "Bug fixes" commit and no description of the changes. Seems like a single guy is just cowboying the whole App, it's not a team project at Telegram. Which explains the above... https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master/TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/ui/ChatActivity.java https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master/TMessagesPr...
- solarkraft 9y ago
  However it feels very good to use. Cases in which something gets weirdly stuck (happens in other apps) are virtually non existent. It is fast and quite reliable. Perhaps surprisingly so.
  - 9y ago