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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

If i remember correctly, Telegram pre-dates Signal by several months. It was well-established by the time Signal became usable. This said, the relationship between Telegram and the cryptography community has always been rocky, probably because they touted their E2E support as a differentiator from the start (Whatsapp, Messenger, and whatever-Google-had were not e2e at the time) but quite a few people pointed out their implementation was weird and broken (it has since changed).

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I think Textsecure[1], the predecessor of Signal, is even older (2010)

And Wikipeida also says that the first version of the Signal Protocol is from 2013[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol

So Telegram launched by about a month early, but the people behind Signal had released prior art earlier, and merely the protocol a few months later, but the Signal app didn't come out until 2015 according to Wikipedia.

They indeed were one of the first if not the first to come out with a messaging app that can e2e encrypt your chat. This was a time when WhatsApp was found using a plaintext protocol, and right after the Snowden revelations. They did move the needle a bit at the right time.

One of the most vocal critics was Moxie, who later founded Signal. It's ironic that 7 years after Snowden and Telegram, Signal the supposed more secure and privacy focused messaging app still has yet to gain any sizable foothold in the market. I think that says a lot about both Telegram and Signal's product strategies.

TextSecure (essentially the old name for Signal) is 3 years older (2010 vs. 2013), isn't it?

The timeline seems to suggest e2e had always been at the heart of the protocol, but I'm not sure if TextSecure and RedPhone were actually apps that people could install after Whisper Systems was acquired by Twitter. Regardless, instant messaging hadn't seem to be introduced until 2014. Tough call.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure#/media/File:Signal_...

TextSecure was available from Google Play for years, I've used it since release. The transformation to Signal was pretty seamless.

>They indeed were one of the first if not the first to come out with a messaging app that can e2e encrypt your chat.

Off The Record showed up in 2004 and was used over multiple instant messaging systems. OpenPGP was used over various IM systems before that...

SCIMP also predates Telegram by several months https://web.archive.org/web/20150402122917/https://silentcir...

Well, if you go that far lol. I remember OTR on Pidgin and Adium back in the days. Not sure I'd consider these third party tacked on solutions e2ee messaging app that can e2e encrypt your chat. OpenPGP doesn't come with email and OTR doesn't come with GTalk.

OTR did come with other apps. OpenPGP was a documented XMPP extension.

The signal protocol is used in WhatsApp, and will be rolled out as a part of Google's latest RCS effort. Signal maybe didn't catch on, but Moxie's goal of making communications encrypted seems to have worked out all right.

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