14 ms·
Telegram: Payments 2.0, Scheduled Voice Chats, New Web Versions
- h0nd 5y agoI am really amazed, how telegram is able to make an app with so many functions and its download size on iOS remains below 100MB. This is insane, comparing with little functionality of other apps that easily 'weigh' 200+MB.
- Ashanmaril 5y agoGlad to see the new web versions. The current version at web.telegram.org is pretty outdated and limited. I also didn't like the favicon for an unread message because you could barely tell the difference between it and the standard favicon. It bugged me to the point where I made a PR to fix it myself but it seems like the repo wasn't really being touched much. Lots of PRs with no activity from the maintainers.
- est 5y ago> With the new web versions you can get instant access to your chats on any device – desktop or mobile. These apps are incredibly efficient, requiring only a 400 KB download (that's like two photos of a medium-sized cat) and no installation. webz.telegram.org and webk.telegram.org look amazing. That's web apps done right. Small .js files intead of 20MB main.min.js crap.
- WA9ACE 5y agowebk transferred 627 Kb, and is fully functional. Slack, Discord, Teams, and friends could all stand to trim their web application's bloat a bit and take a lesson from this.
- holler 5y agoI'm working on a new realtime discussion site https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im and one of my goals is to keep it as lean/fast as possible, both as a competitive angle & because I find it interesting. So far I get ~445kb transferred, but I have plans to lower it even further with a combination of caching and other strategies.
- aquadrop 5y agoWhat would be competitive angle? What percentage of users do you think would care if your app transfers not 445kb but 345kb (sincere question)? I just always was skeptical about "reducing sizes" just for its own sake, and not in the frame of improving performance or noticeably reducing latency for the user (which could be related to the size or not). Can't argue with the interesting part :)
- holler 5y agoGood question, and of course the difference between 445kb & 345kb may not be noticeable, but it would be if you compared it against 1/2/10mb etc. The competitive angle is really delivering a fast/snappy/responsive experience on mobile or desktop. That in itself isn't going to save you, but it is an advantage if part of the sell is a high quality experience. Re:interesting, for instance I just started experimenting with inlining all css/js into index.html (so far the js part is problematic), minifying classnames, and I'm curious if it'd be possible to even minify js module names etc.
- perryizgr8 5y agoI don't understand why there are 2 slightly different websites. Both are good, just with minor changes to the fonts and spacing.
- WA9ACE 5y agoFrom what I can tell so far webz appears to be using significant amount of wasm.
- fullstop 5y agoTelegram devs compete internally.
- tenacious_tuna 5y agoThey did this a while back with their Android (and iOS?) apps--they had the core Telegram app, and Telegram X. Both had 90% overlapping features, but some subtle differences. It's long enough ago that it's a bit fuzzy in my head, but I think X had slightly better reply gestures, and maybe chat pinning. Later I think they absorbed the X features into the core app. I can't decide if I think it's an awesome strategy to launch a self-competing project, or if it just leads to terrible internal issues. I'm leaning more towards the former--I'm a huge believer in the instructive power of contrast, and it's a lot "safer" to contrast against another one of your own products than a competitor. You control much more of the "experiment", and you don't run the risk of cannibalizing your own users. Plus, from an engineering standpoint, it forces you to have portable technologies and configs, and probably gives your team opportunities to learn from greenfield stuff that can then encourage refactors or other paying-down-tech-debt activities. It's also just dang impressive that they're able to spin up multiple versions of the same app, and deploy them, and maintain them. That speaks volumes to me about their internal systems, build systems, resource allocation, etc.
- solarkraft 5y agoOTOH as far as I remember much of Nokia's issues came from internal competition involving sabotage of other teams. Not that that has to happen, but the incentives are a tiny bit dangerous.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paozac 5y agoZawinski's law 2.0: every chat application attempts to expand until it can process payments.
- gaudat 5y agoImagine if Durov put up a donation link on his channel. I wonder what happens if I use a real credit card in the demo shop.
- maratc 5y agoDon't forget this part (for completeness): "Those apps which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
- Fogest 5y agoHonestly I really like using Telegram since I switched from WhatsApp and I actually would find it pretty neat if I could use Telegram to interact with some local merchants. Unfortunately I am in Canada and I've yet to see any merchants doing this. My pharmacist is on WhatsApp and it's nice to just shoot a message saying "Hey I'll be needing a refill on xyz, thanks". He is pretty into technology and trying new things out so not too surprising he had incorporated WhatsApp. However here we already has support at pretty much every merchant for tapping to pay with phones or tapping with our credit/debit cards so I don't see a huge amount of benefits to this. For example the ordering of pizzas almost seems like it would just be easier on a website. Often when ordering pizza for the family we do things like getting half the pizza with 3 toppings and the other half with 3 different ones. This would start to get annoying to order from a bot. So I am having a hard time finding use cases for the payment side of things in North America. I just can't think of many text based interactions I'd have with merchants that would be more ideal than using a website.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoStill waiting on the Hacker News Karmacoin
- ilovefood 5y agoTelegram really doesn't cease to amaze me with the amount of features it's packing and everything that is possible. Really tremendous development and engineering feat, especially at this scale. I love the app and use it constantly.
- barbazoo 5y agoSorry, I couldn't help but read this as an ad.
- ilovefood 5y agoIt's alright, every feedback is valuable. What would you have written differently and besides, what alternatives would you suggest and why?
- leeman2016 5y agoIt really is that good. Out of the bunch of apps on my iPhone Telegram is the one that is fast, effectively using cellular data, feature packed. The Unigram client on Windows 10 is also neat.
- fuzzybear3965 5y agoTelegram has some nice features from a user's perspective (arbitrary filetype file attachment, animated voice records so I can skip quiet portions, good chat search, private chat support, and video-/picture-/file-/message -specific search). But, one of the main utilities on Telegram is its bot platform. And, as a developer: Building bots with Telegram is difficult. This is mostly a documentation issue. AFAIK this is the main documentation page: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api https://core.telegram.org/bots/api which, subjectively speaking is really hard to read, and, objectively speaking, offers no sample responses/interactivity. This page tries to fill the gap on tutorials/how-to: https://core.telegram.org/bots https://core.telegram.org/bots but without sample code. There are a few bots you can find on GitHub, but nothing official that I could find. Documentation on bot limitations in channels vs. groups is also really spotty. Trying to detect who joined a group/channel and greet them, for example, or trying to send a message on departure, is non-trivial.
- riskable 5y agoAs an outsider--who doesn't use Telegram--it looks like they want to become like WeChat outside of China: Where you shop and do basically everything from within a single application (Telegram). They claim this is improved privacy but it doesn't look like that to me. Instead of my transaction being between myself and a merchant it's me, the merchant, and Telegram. Furthermore, Telegram can now aggregate all my purchases and info across multiple merchants (and whatever else I do). They say they store, "no payment information" but that's really only a small part of any given transaction. They may still record what you bought and how much it cost along with when it was purchased. All the, "no payment information" claim means is that they're not storing your credit card/account numbers.
- newscracker 5y ago> Instead of my transaction being between myself and a merchant it's me, the merchant, and Telegram. The part about a transaction being between you and a merchant is true only if you use cash and only if you physically buy something with a physical receipt or no receipt. If you use any digital payments, then the transaction metadata is known to several parties (beyond your card issuer and the merchant’s bank). If you buy something online, usually your email provider also has access to your entire purchase history. So the main question is whether you trust Telegram more or less than your email provider and/or all the parties who get your transaction data.
- darthrupert 5y agoEvery payment processor you use can do the same. And they've been consolidating under the same roof for a while now. I wouldn't be surprised if they all sold their data to some central processors, too.
- SPascareli13 5y agoWhats App is doing the same, already in testing phase in Brazil.
- vishnugupta 5y ago...and have rolled out to 100% users in India.
- sahaskatta 5y agoIs it E2E by default yet?
- carlob 5y agoE2E isn't even supported on desktop and web versions yet.
- out_of_protocol 5y agoHaving no E2E by default (or at all) is, probably, intentional.
- baxuz 5y agoWhat are you talking about? Secret chats, which are E2EE, are supported on Unigram and other desktop clients.
- solarkraft 5y agoBut not tdesktop, which is the official desktop client.
- baxuz 5y agoTelegram 7.7, MacOS, I have the feature.
- capableweb 5y agoAnd judging by the issue for secret chats have been closed since 2016, they have no interest in implementing it either. https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/871 https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/871
- f311a 5y agoNo, and they don't have plans to enable it. One of the reasons is technical: It's pretty hard to use E2E and support multiple devices.
- bnj 5y agoThe feature to schedule voice chats really struck me as an example of something that seems so obvious in retrospect. I hope to see more of this innovation around phone-features trickle down to the native iOS phone options.
- ComodoHacker 5y agoIt seems obvious now after COVID-19 has shifted our view of online events.
- bombcar 5y agoIsn't this one feature completely replace Clubhouse?
- alskdj21 5y agoThe web apps are super interesting. Its light and fast. On par with the desktop client. Meanwhile, Facebook Messenger takes eons to load, Discord's web client's initial load will hog up my CPU. It will be interesting to see the technology behind this. edit: Links for those interested Web Z: https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt web K: https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb
- f311a 5y agoTelegram team has a long history of using vanilla javascript as optimal as possible. It all started at VK.
- capableweb 5y ago"vanilla javascript" usually refers to something like manipulating the DOM directly, without using frameworks, transpiled languages and similar. Both of them seems to be using a bunch of different tech, from typescript to wasm, jsx and more, not sure I'd call that vanilla javascript. On a second note, I'm surprised that both the new web versions are so similar. Seems just a couple of margins changed and other minor changes (profile picture filling the background vs being a centered circle for example), but built differently. Wonder if they both worked towards the same design maybe? Edit: found explanations to the multiple-codebases behavior further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943653
- solarkraft 5y agoCool new stuff. The new web clients are pretty nice, while the old one sucked terribly. The Android app does keep getting smoother and the new features are cool, I guess (though I don't use payments at all). There's a background to the new web download, however: They've recently started blocking some channels with the message "This message can't be displayed on Telegram apps downloaded from the Google Play Store". It's also new (and quite cool) to me that reproducible builds are apparently now a thing - the FOSS version of Telegram used to lag way behind the official one which made it pretty difficult to use.
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoWith every Telegram update, I keep hoping that they improve their video chat. As it stands, it is much lower quality compared to Skype or Duo.
- athorax 5y agoMy n=1 anecdote is that is largely depends on the phones being used for the video chat. My OnePlus 6t works great when talking to a Samsung Galaxy S10e, but is terrible when talking with someone using a Galaxy S9+
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoI found the quality to be lacking (looking like 480p) with desktops using the standard Logitech webcams.
- The_rationalist 5y agoCan the new web versions be used as Electron apps? I find the QT Linux telegram official app to have abysmal scrolling performance.
- depingus 5y agoYou can self host them or run them locally. Web Z: https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt web K: https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb
- ghostwriter 5y agois it possible to write and host your own telegram web client, a.k.a. are all the features the new clients use publicly available to third-party implementations?
- depingus 5y agoWeb Z: https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt https://github.com/Ajaxy/telegram-tt web K: https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb https://github.com/morethanwords/tweb
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy21 5y agoI don't see the value of any of this. I guess I'm not their target market.
- afiori 5y agoTelegram has always tried to pivot toward being a platform (bots, games, public channels, public podcasts), this is another step in that direction, ideally* this could be a low friction option for an individual creator to profit from a side gig. *Depending on many factor that might not be true
- ruslan 5y agoSame do I. Telegram more and more smells like WeChat.
- godelski 5y agoI'm actually finding the responses between Telegram and Signal's announcements interesting. While there were some shady things with Signal a lot of people were upset about the feature in general saying that a messaging app should just stay a messaging app as well as callbacks to how Telegram failed. So I was kinda surprised to come into this thread finding everyone being so positive and encouraged by the superapp aspects.
- wrinkl3 5y agoImo the main difference is Signal locking you into an arcane cryptocurrency, while Telegram provides you with a large choice of mainstream fiat payment processors. I agree that the features are not that different, but Telegram's approach feels much more palatable.
- godelski 5y agoI see that as a big difference too, but still a large fraction of the complaints were purely about the payment aspect. Remembering back to Telegram's payments 1.0 a lot of people were excited about it then too. I'm just curious why people are much more cynical about Signal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rOOb85 5y agoTelegram does not care about your privacy. It's always been an after thought. Of course they would implement non privacy respecting payments. Signal is all about privacy. It trumps everything else. There are no "mainstream" payment options that align with their privacy requirements. It's not a 1:1 comparison. They both want to achieve the same goal(payment integration) buy have vastly different requirements.
- newscracker 5y ago> Signal is all about privacy. It trumps everything else. Strong disagree with this claim. Signal exposes your phone number to others when you chat. I can add random phone numbers to my address book and find out if those numbers are tied to a Signal account and get to the profile even. Telegram hides phone numbers by default and also has settings to prevent such enumeration, wherein you cannot know that I’m on Telegram by adding my number to your address book unless I also have your number in my address book.
- throwawaysea 5y agoHow can Telegram help us all move away from dependency on a small cabal of big payment players (PayPal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard)? A big part of privacy and protection against censorship is avoiding these providers, who regularly stop payments for things they disagree with.
- ruslan 5y agoIt can not. Telegram desperately wants to become "one of them".
- owaislone 5y agoI just tried one of the apps and it had instant feedback when I gave it the wrong 2FA code. It felt too fast for any network calls to be involved. I looked at the network tab in my browser and sure enough no network calls were being made. It looks like they are using some sort of client side crypto to verify or at least reject tokens. Does anyone any idea about why they'd chose to do it client side or what I am missing?
- trhaynes 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-Time_Password https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-Time_Password
- hexo 5y agoUnsolicited animations all over again. :(
- gordon_freeman 5y agoI am just genuinely surprised by the pace of launching new features by Telegram. I don't know how many developers they employ but this is impressive nonetheless.
- FragenAntworten 5y agoLooking at the open positions linked at the end, "high IQ score" is one of the preferred qualifications for Assistant to the CEO. Is that... normal? I've never seen IQ mentioned in a job posting, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Doubly so considering that it's likely the CEO had a hand in writing it.
- Barrin92 5y agodoesn't seem very normal, or at least I've never seen it anywhere either. Not to mention that pretty much anyone can bullshit on that metric