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You may not prefer it, but I don't think it's moronic; it was a design choice. Whatsapp messages pass through their servers, but do not remain there. They are
by ddeck 6y ago
You may not prefer it, but I don't think it's moronic; it was a design choice.
Whatsapp messages pass through their servers, but do not remain there. They are effectively sent from the sending device to the receiving device. This means that your messages reside on your device. When you use the desktop or web client, it's basically remote operating your phone.
This famously allowed Whatsapp to achieve massive scale with relatively few resources. [1]
Telegram messages reside on their servers. This allows for features such as those discussed above - multiple synchronized clients etc. The downside (aside from potential privacy concerns) is that it requires much larger amount of infrastructure, which presumably is one of the reasons they need $700 million.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
- f1refly 6y agoWhatsapp is pretty much proprietary xmpp, and xmpp handles multi-end to multi-end encryption graceously.
- brianacton 6y agoNot true. While WhatsApp may have started with xmpp / ejabberd at the beginning, it quickly diverted away from xmpp and has its own protocol
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago"This famously allowed Whatsapp to achieve massive scale with relatively few resources." And now they've had a decade to address the issue.
- shp0ngle 6y agoIt's also for security reasons. Telegram is not E2E encrypted, WhatsApp is. Telegram has the option of E2E encrypted messages, but that then works only from one phone/PC.
- robbiep 6y agoI don’t know how true that really is. I have never used backup for WhatsApp but just the other day, out of the blue, every conversation from late 2017 to now that I had deleted popped back into my inbox. Can’t explain that one easily