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Comment by throwaway3627 | Hacker News Reader

Use Signal. The. End.

Unpopular opinions ahead. I like Telegram and Wire, with Telegram far ahead in features. Once I get people to use Telegram and describe how it's different and better than WhatsApp (except default E2E), they realize that it is indeed nicer, and want to reduce using WhatsApp.

Wire is fine (not as good as or fast as Telegram), but the company seems to be focused on paying customers to increase revenues. So free customers hardly get any support or responses from support (the auto-replies from Wire support state this priority). I like that Wire is by default E2E and syncs conversations across devices and platforms!

I've been waiting to recommend Signal to others for at least three or four years now. But it's 2019, and Signal is still bad in UX and messaging reliability (not to mention one still can't migrate conversations to another device on iOS).

Somehow Telegram shows normal chats as notifications but if its an encrypted chat, it shows a "You received a message". Seems they are hostile to e2e.

No, they just don't want to leak the message contents to your notification screen.

Huge plus for regular users is that you can be online in the desktop app without having your phone near or on. When my phone broke, Telegram was one of the few ways to quickly inform my friends.

Much depends on your threat model. Telegram is plenty good for keeping your conversations out of the hands of Facebook and Google, and the user experience with synching messages/drafts between devices and editing/deleting of messages blows the doors off Signal, iMessage, and the like. And for all the whinging about Telegram's security model, there's yet to be a documented hack of the server.

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