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From my experience of constantly using both, Signal's UX is inferior unfortunately. On both macOS and iOS Signal feels like a second grade cross-platform app wi
by mojuba 3y ago
From my experience of constantly using both, Signal's UX is inferior unfortunately. On both macOS and iOS Signal feels like a second grade cross-platform app with a clunky Android feel (no ribbon effect, no animations, poor aesthetics).
Telegram's UX quality is far superior to any other messenger app that I've ever used. Its social functions are quite nice too, I think Telegram invented some of them before they were copied by the others.
The thing with Telegram though is that you can never trust a private company if you are a journalist, dissident or a government official. We don't know whether Pavel Durov is as independent as he wants us to believe he is. The big red flag in the Telegram story is why it's still not banned or censored in Russia. We don't know.
But all in all, kudos to those who have built it, they have my respect, Telegram is one of the best pieces of software at least among the messaging apps.
- jamil7 3y agoI also use both extensively and I agree, Telegram has the best UX of any messaging app. The desktop app is QT I think so it feels very snappy compared to Signal's electron app. Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS
- darthrupert 3y agoIt is a very good client indeed, and Signal is not really catching up. Perhaps Matrix's upcoming Element X -client could reach that level of quality.
- kaba0 3y agoThanks for mentioning Element X. I do like the Matrix protocol, but their former ios app was very buggy.
- Arathorn 3y agoElement X is already out on iOS (as an early release which isn't feature complete yet): https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e.... We explicitly used Telegram as the UX yardstick to be at least as good at in terms of quality and performance (sync speed, smoothness of scrolling, proper native UI, etc)... while also being E2EE throughout (unlike Telegram). Agreed that the classic Element iOS app was very buggy, which is why with Element X we completely rewrote it on top of matrix-rust-sdk, using SwiftUI for best-practice idiomatic native UI on top.
- kaba0 3y agoThank you, I have already downloaded it! So far it looks like you have absolutely managed to hit that yardstick!
- darthrupert 3y agoUnfortunately the server I use doesn't support sliding sync yet. edit Also, how far is Element X? I just tried it out with a matrix.org account, and it still makes the pretty bad UX blunder of confusing private one-on-one chats with rooms. I don't doubt that they're rooms technically, but you really need to hide that fact from the user if you wish to reach Telegram's usability.
- Arathorn 3y agoEX is about 2 weeks old. It doesn’t yet have filters to split DMs from rooms, but it will.
- Arathorn 3y agoplus unless I’m missing something, telegram doesn’t seem to distinguish DMs from group chats in the room list either?
- darthrupert 3y ago
- coolspot 3y agoWhatsApp, Signal, Google Talk and others are also not banned/censored in Russia.
- darthrupert 3y agoWhich makes Telegram extremely suspicious, frankly.
- mojuba 3y agoTelegram was banned in Russia before it was restored in 2020. Wikipedia says Telegram agreed to cooperate with the Russian govt "help with extremism investigations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia