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I think Telegram does really well on both functionality and UX, but is really brought down by their closed-source policy. I'm not sure what the motivations behind that are.

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The clients are all open source; the server isn't, but the last time I checked they plan to opensource it as soon as they make sure there aren't any major exploits someone could use against it. Which I know might sound silly, because the open source community could find and patch those, but in light of all the recent crypto-related security bugs lately, it makes you wonder if it is a wise decision after all.

Founders of Telegram was never successful in OSS, they just don't have interest in this. This was clearly marketing stuff. I tried to make something really opensourced, but no one was interested in the Telegram LLC.

I think that, when it comes to secure and private communications, you can't really make any sort of claim in that direction if you're not open source.

Also, I think you have to assume a powerful adversary already has the source code, even if it is closed source.

The only way you can level the playing field between the likes of the NSA and us is to open source it.

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