6 ms·

Another useful feature, interesting article to look how it works under the hood. And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features in

Another useful feature, interesting article to look how it works under the hood. And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features into such amazing UI. And then I'm looking at other alternatives, from naked WhatsApp over laggy wechat to horrible UX in signal. What's the reason for telegram amazing performance and features?

iqanq 5y ago
>What's the reason for telegram amazing performance and features? Wouldn't a better question be "what's the reason for other apps having crappy performance and subpar features"?
- pjerem 5y ago
  Telegram is pretty impressive when you take into account the number of (well implemented) features that they managed to shove in the app without breaking ergonomics and performance. At this point, I just think the answer is top notch developers and designers with an impressive alignment about what the product should be. I know no other free application with such an amazing usability. There must be some shitload of money behind them, for sure.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    I think it's the result of every one of the clients (desktop, android, ios) having only one developer each.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Discord ?
    - sorenjan 5y ago
      Does Discord have a native (not Electron) desktop app?
      - BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Nope. I guess though that with lots and lots of money you can make even an Electron app work well ?
    - kroltan 5y ago
      Not quite, Discord's conceptual design is much messier due to its monetization attempts. Plus nowadays it isn't nearly as fast as it was a couple years ago.
lucb1e 5y ago
From what I gathered: a boatload of money from the rich owner for development and hosting, plus not caring about encryption in any way. Don't need to bother with tricky distributed device syncing protocols if your servers simply store everything and can index the data at leisure for fast global search etc. It's still impressive, though. It's not as if Facebook's chat works this well and that isn't (wasn't?) encrypted either and they've got an even bigger pile of cash. It's also a lot older though, just look at the evolution from IRC to MSN to Facebook to Telegram: each step it gets better. Maybe that's how that difference can be explained? Anyway, between normal messengers like Signal/Whatsapp/Wire/etc. and Telegram, the main difference is not caring about privacy. (To be clear, I don't mean that whatsapp is a privacy-conscious messenger as they will collect what they want behind the scenes, but on the client side they have to care about keeping the server "untrusted" and that will slow everything down a lot.)
- p1anecrazy 5y ago
  People tend to forget that Whatsapp encryption was introduced years after Telegram’s secret chats. Now they are continuously bashed for no encryption by default, but their original proposition was “messenger done right” as compared to unencrypted Whatsapp and FB.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    I'm well aware of that and I don't have WhatsApp because of its privacy problems (much to the annoyance of some family members, but I imagine it saved me from a lot of printer queries, and if they aren't willing to switch then why should I). What I think you're underappreciating is that Telegram was built on the premise of privacy and they've neglected that from day one. It was better than the status quo on day one (at release), but have fallen further and further behind ever since. Telegram was launched when Whatsapp sent messages without transport encryption over port 443 (this was fun on public wifi!) and got big when Whatsapp was bought by Facebook because Telegram was independent and had proper end to end encryption (with air quotes around "proper" if you like; it wasn't OTR-grade but at least it was better than the status quo). Since then, nothing happened whatsoever on the privacy front. Even the legal compliance is a complete joke (gdpr data exports only work in a few clients and not very well at that), but more importantly to me, they need gdpr data exports because the servers still know everything. Whatsapp moved on, Signal got a lot more mature, Wire has also come onto the playing field, and Telegram has done nothing since before Snowden told us to turn on https basically.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Another useful feature, interesting article to look how it works under the hood. I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is that they’re misusing Google APIs to avoid paying for the proper way of doing things. This feature will break as soon as Google throws up a captcha, because these endpoints aren’t intended to be used programmatically. > And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features into such amazing UI. The translate functionality comes from Google. They’re just sending messages to Google and getting a result back, at least until Google detects the API misuse and breaks the response.
jcelerier 5y ago
Written in C++ / Qt for the most part :-)

iqanq 5y ago

>What's the reason for telegram amazing performance and features? Wouldn't a better question be "what's the reason for other apps having crappy performance and subpar features"?

pjerem 5y ago
Telegram is pretty impressive when you take into account the number of (well implemented) features that they managed to shove in the app without breaking ergonomics and performance. At this point, I just think the answer is top notch developers and designers with an impressive alignment about what the product should be. I know no other free application with such an amazing usability. There must be some shitload of money behind them, for sure.
- iqanq 5y ago
  I think it's the result of every one of the clients (desktop, android, ios) having only one developer each.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Discord ?
  - sorenjan 5y ago
    Does Discord have a native (not Electron) desktop app?
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Nope. I guess though that with lots and lots of money you can make even an Electron app work well ?
  - kroltan 5y ago
    Not quite, Discord's conceptual design is much messier due to its monetization attempts. Plus nowadays it isn't nearly as fast as it was a couple years ago.

lucb1e 5y ago

From what I gathered: a boatload of money from the rich owner for development and hosting, plus not caring about encryption in any way. Don't need to bother with tricky distributed device syncing protocols if your servers simply store everything and can index the data at leisure for fast global search etc. It's still impressive, though. It's not as if Facebook's chat works this well and that isn't (wasn't?) encrypted either and they've got an even bigger pile of cash. It's also a lot older though, just look at the evolution from IRC to MSN to Facebook to Telegram: each step it gets better. Maybe that's how that difference can be explained? Anyway, between normal messengers like Signal/Whatsapp/Wire/etc. and Telegram, the main difference is not caring about privacy. (To be clear, I don't mean that whatsapp is a privacy-conscious messenger as they will collect what they want behind the scenes, but on the client side they have to care about keeping the server "untrusted" and that will slow everything down a lot.)

p1anecrazy 5y ago
People tend to forget that Whatsapp encryption was introduced years after Telegram’s secret chats. Now they are continuously bashed for no encryption by default, but their original proposition was “messenger done right” as compared to unencrypted Whatsapp and FB.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  I'm well aware of that and I don't have WhatsApp because of its privacy problems (much to the annoyance of some family members, but I imagine it saved me from a lot of printer queries, and if they aren't willing to switch then why should I). What I think you're underappreciating is that Telegram was built on the premise of privacy and they've neglected that from day one. It was better than the status quo on day one (at release), but have fallen further and further behind ever since. Telegram was launched when Whatsapp sent messages without transport encryption over port 443 (this was fun on public wifi!) and got big when Whatsapp was bought by Facebook because Telegram was independent and had proper end to end encryption (with air quotes around "proper" if you like; it wasn't OTR-grade but at least it was better than the status quo). Since then, nothing happened whatsoever on the privacy front. Even the legal compliance is a complete joke (gdpr data exports only work in a few clients and not very well at that), but more importantly to me, they need gdpr data exports because the servers still know everything. Whatsapp moved on, Signal got a lot more mature, Wire has also come onto the playing field, and Telegram has done nothing since before Snowden told us to turn on https basically.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Another useful feature, interesting article to look how it works under the hood. I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is that they’re misusing Google APIs to avoid paying for the proper way of doing things. This feature will break as soon as Google throws up a captcha, because these endpoints aren’t intended to be used programmatically. > And again, i wonder how a tiny team can push such great and useful features into such amazing UI. The translate functionality comes from Google. They’re just sending messages to Google and getting a result back, at least until Google detects the API misuse and breaks the response.

jcelerier 5y ago

Written in C++ / Qt for the most part :-)