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I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat

I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025. I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good. (Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)

palata 2y ago
> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025. Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
- athenot 2y ago
  This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple. I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
  - palata 2y ago
    > This is not entirely true. My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible). > I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)? > then do what's needed to support it What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade! > Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
- Klonoar 2y ago
  This is such an odd comment. What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this. Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
  - maqp 2y ago
    Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers. Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
    - Klonoar 2y ago
      > Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up. > Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this. > Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do. This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.
      - maqp 2y ago
        >Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature. >Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it. Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification. They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work. Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design. I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE. Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun. Signal has over time polished its secure features. Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.
Arathorn 2y ago
Telegram certainly has an excellent UI/UX. On the Element side, its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X - and (in my biased opinion) we are getting very close, if not exceeding it in some places. For instance, we just landed The Event Cache in Element X and matrix-rust-sdk (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 - closed 2 days ago after a year of solid work), which provides seamless offline support and local encrypted-at-rest caching of the messages it's seen, which in turn then makes the native SwiftUI and jetpack-compose UIs go brrrrrr.
- Klonoar 2y ago
  > its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now. i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).
- db579 2y ago
  Arathorn I'm a bit confused that Element pushes Element X so much already when your own Element One service doesn't support it yet?
  - Arathorn 2y ago
    It's just because all the effort has gone into EX over the last ~2 years, and it's a way way way better app (even if it doesn't have threads/spaces yet). Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.

palata 2y ago

> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025. Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.

athenot 2y ago
This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple. I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
- palata 2y ago
  > This is not entirely true. My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible). > I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)? > then do what's needed to support it What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade! > Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
Klonoar 2y ago
This is such an odd comment. What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this. Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
- maqp 2y ago
  Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers. Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    > Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up. > Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this. > Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do. This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.
    - maqp 2y ago
      >Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature. >Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it. Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification. They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work. Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design. I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE. Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun. Signal has over time polished its secure features. Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.

Arathorn 2y ago

Telegram certainly has an excellent UI/UX. On the Element side, its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X - and (in my biased opinion) we are getting very close, if not exceeding it in some places. For instance, we just landed The Event Cache in Element X and matrix-rust-sdk (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 - closed 2 days ago after a year of solid work), which provides seamless offline support and local encrypted-at-rest caching of the messages it's seen, which in turn then makes the native SwiftUI and jetpack-compose UIs go brrrrrr.

Klonoar 2y ago
> its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now. i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).
db579 2y ago
Arathorn I'm a bit confused that Element pushes Element X so much already when your own Element One service doesn't support it yet?
- Arathorn 2y ago
  It's just because all the effort has gone into EX over the last ~2 years, and it's a way way way better app (even if it doesn't have threads/spaces yet). Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.