It has some convenience tradeoffs. E.g. I can read the same chat on phone and desktop without hiccups.
Signal has a desktop client as well (no web one, unfortunately) – I also haven't seen any hiccups there.
Yes, this is 10 or 100 times more complicated to get right when using end-to-end encryption, but it's clearly doable, and Telegram has finally been proven wrong empirically about there being a dilemma of security vs. usability in messaging.
Yes, they still lead the field in usability, but the encrypted competition is past the hard cryptographic hurdles, allowing them to focus on the front end.
It just doesn’t work right. It’s good for typing with a keyboard, but other than that, it’s always lagging behind the phone, which has to be online.
Whatsapp UI and search are OK but if you have a very long chat history then simple things like jumping to a specific date are difficult. I end up guessing a medium-to-rare search term and using the search history to jump back.
I'd much prefer having control of the data with simple export to my own device for my own search/analysis, but none of these apps do it.
In the new multi-device beta, desktop clients only sync about a year's worth of messages, though. Not sure if this will change in the final product.