> I believe they have put the most love into their user interfaces out of all the chat programs I have seen
Absolutely true.
Telegram: Best UI. Signal: Best privacy. WhatsApp: Largest userbase.
It's interesting to think about these three dimensions. I could theoretically pinpoint everything that make Telegram's UI the best, and copy it. I could do the same with Signal's privacy. Both of these are technical problems. There's a process for becoming the best at UI, and there's a process for becoming the best at privacy. I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Other than the 3 big ones, I recently found Jami [1]
Good UI, though not as good as Telegram. Arguably better privacy than Signal - you don't even need an account if you don't want. Zero userbase. Free software.
Telegram is also the best at first class support of all the platforms it runs on. In addition to the Qt-based app that's popular on Windows and Linux, the predominant client on macOS/iOS is AppKit/UIKit-based, and there exist numerous other native clients (such as UWP/WinAppSDK on Windows, GTK on Linux, and CLI for anything with a command line).
In comparison everything else puts reasonable effort into the mobile clients and phones in the rest with bloated, half-baked web apps or if you're lucky an iOS Catalyst port.
Along with UI/UX quality, this stuff matters and impacts adoption, even if most users can't put their reasoning into words.
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Easy: Be at the right spot in the right time and be lucky to be noticed.
WhatsApp had one smart idea: tying accounts to phone number, which solved detectability, while SMS where expensive in many regions. When ICQ/AIM still missed the mobile market and before Apple made iMessage.
Easy to replicate, as we can see with Facebook messenger or Google's different attempts, who invested quite a few resources into that.
I tried Jami for a bit with a friend. For both me and my friend, Jami was very unreliable about delivering notifications about new messages. So my friend would send me a message but because I didn’t get any notification about the message it would go days before I opened the app and saw that he had said something, and I’d respond to it and it would be days before he would happen to open the app again because he also didn’t get any notification.
This is sadly a ubiquitous problem with FOSS phone software. Google's and Apple's notification systems are anti-FOSS. You can use your own on Google phones, but then your app will have to wake up periodically to check it, and the system will detect your app as a battery waster, tell the user your app is a battery waster, and automatically prevent your app waking up to prevent battery waste. And on Apple I believe you simply can't do that because they user has to open the app to wake it.
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
I was at WhatsApp from 2014 - 2019. Growing a large userbase from scratch doesn't happen by any one factor. You have to do a lot of things well. (and probably get lucky)
a) potential users need a compelling reason to join. Messaging at data rates was significant, but not in the US were many people had large messaging allowances. Works better than SMS/MMS was compelling for some.
b) existing users need to be satisfied enough to stay: service has to work consistently, client has to work, etc.
c) signup flow needs to work well. Doesn't matter if people want to use the app if they can't. You need to help users understand their phone number (or other identification). You need multiple methods of verification, because SMS doesn't always work. Giving someone a several digit code over the phone is a cognitive task for the user, and it's harder with disjointed speech generation, so you need to spend some time on that too. You need multiple providers because if you can't get verification codes to users, some of those people will give up and never come back. Since you have multiple providers, you need to figure out how to pick one based on current conditions which you also need to figure out how to track. Also --- you need some money, sending all these codes gets expensive. Phone numbers as ids is a blessing because "everyone has one" and you can use the system address book for contacts, but verification costs add up; usernames or email as id make contact discovery messy and a surprising amount of people in the developing world don't have an email address or don't know what it is.
d) users get new phones, a lot, you need to make it easy to move their account. Or they will likely drop your service when they get a new phone.
e) you need to be prepared for and handle large events. If some big news happens, people will want to talk about it. If some similar service has an outage, you will get more traffic --- if you also fall over, that's a lost opportunity.
f) things need to work well on the devices people actually have. Which might not be the ones you would prefer to use. Worldwide, most people don't have flagship phones. If you want a large number of users, having good experiences only on recent flagships is self limiting. Working well (or at least better than alternatives) on low end and older devices is a path towards addressing users that others miss.
There's probably more. Most of these require sustained consistent effort to deliver. It's not a one time thing. And it's not quick. Sustained consistent effort is easy enough as a one product start-up, but it's very hard as a big-corp.
Userbase can be a positive feedback loop: once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join ... and having no one to talk to is a reason to leave. There's not really a way to jump start it, unless you've already got a large user base somewhere else that you can use to seed your service.
Of all the things you listed, which are surely important, you also said the single most important factor in the end:
> once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join. There's not really a way to jump start it
So, a monopoly that was lucky enough to be the first one to solve some (minor, if I may) technical problems.
We need forced interoperability. Facebook has no right to control the communications of so many billions of people, just because Whatsapp got lucky and then facebook acquired them.
Part of "good UI" is not having E2E, which e.g. gives you sync that actually works, even on new devices, with no weird backups and PIN codes necessary, just like the good old days.
E2EE can work just fine with backup and sync. Signal chose not to do it for a long time and remains cautious, sticking to security over tolerating security-ignorant users.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions. It being closed-source changes nothing about its feature set.
These days, Signal supports (encrypted, even cloud) backups just like WhatsApp or any other messenger.
The problem with UX for many of these apps is that they're designed for people who want to be sure that the government can't read their messages, but that's not something that's possible without compromising on the ease-of-use of SMS and other insecure methods. It's foolish to try to shove a Signal-shaped app into a SMS-shaped hole. I believe Signal's mobile app and (with a better underlying protocol) Telegram's cross-platform UX offer the best mix of secure and safe by default.
Partly, but Signal etc. could just as well have a fast and polished client, and Telegram a clunky electron sloth. Even if you restrict yourself to one device (so no syncing) the difference in quality is undeniable.
Using Molly to get cross-device Signal support works pretty well, though the Android-only approach requires Waydroid or a deprecated Windows feature to run on desktop, unfortunately. Still, it's a lot better than the alternative (which from Signal's side seems to be "none, be glad we support desktop sync at all").
How did we end up with this mess of disjoint chat systems each with their own userbase? Doesn't it indicate that this market desperately needs regulation? Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?
Either you provide message interchange with any other message system operating in a specific country or you can't advertise or sell anything in this country (also app stores must country wide ban). Bootstrap by taking two largest chats and offering them provisional access to the market for few months. If they can provide interchange between them they can remain and others can follow. If not bigest one is out, let's say for two years and the third one (pre-ban) tries to establish interchange with the remaining of the two biggest.
This is going to be a terribly cynical comment, but I've noticed a trend here on HN to introduce laws to fix problems.
The short version is that, no, you can't law yourself out of this (or pretty much anything. )
Firstly, laws have national jurisdiction. There are no "all the countries agreed to this" laws.
Secondly, the US can't actually pass any laws anyway. Congress is deadlocked. It can't even get around to killing daylight saving clock changes (which passed the senate with unanimous support.)
Plus any laws (or, more recently executive orders) just end up in court forever. And when passed may, or may not, be enforced (or enforceable. )
And that's before I point out that big tech buys (sorry, "lobbies") govt in the first place. Apple, Meta, Google would all pay to make this bill go away.
Lastly, everyone seems to forget that interoperability leads to spam. Email is open and completely flooded. SMS is open and basically unusable. Whatsapp grew their user base in part because the experience was spam free. So even if laws declaring openness were proposed they would be far from universally supported.
I shudder to think about calling Telegram UI "good". Maybe chats like Discord spoiled me but both of those feel like way below level of "comfort" for communication longer than "asking about what food you want", especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting.
Both look ass at desktop too, way too many wasted space, tho Telegram at least doesn't stretch the chat on the entire width of monitor when in fullscreen, having to go from far left to far right just to read the chat
> especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting
Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)
I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)
And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.
If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)
Discord UI is abysmal, especially on mobile. Every time I start it I shudder, stare at a stuttering UI that takes way too long to become responsive. It feels like it will make my phone explode.
jami doesn't store message on a server, at least not in 1:1 connection. It is one of the Achille heel in the sense that if you send a message, your recipient is offline, then you go offline before your recipient goes online the message will not have been delivered and will wait until both are online at the same time. It is particularly annoying because most android firmware + iphone kill the app when it is in the background so that people tend to think it is the app that is not working well whereas it is really the operating system that aggressively kill it and prevent it from working well.
A workaround for the messages not being received is to have an opened session on the desktop version running 24/7 at home.
I read that group chats (swarm) are implemented using git and I think the changes are pushed between clients directly. Again it is nice if you have a permanent group to have at least one client running 24/7
It has the option of doing that, it asks you if you want to enable the backups.
It also allows you to encrypt the backups with a passkey or a password that you can manually set, client-side.
It didn’t always have the encryption option I think.
In one of the early releases of animated emoji on Telegram (I want to say the very first one), it did. Then Apple objected and it stopped. Then shortly afterwards like half of the rest started doing something suggestive but not the eggplant. A lot of fun was had on the Internet imagining the product meetings for all of that.
(Not that any of it is particularly relevant to the quality of Telegram’s UI, which is indeed unmatched.)
Basically, Telegram used to have eggplant sticker that cums, until Apple forced them to remove it. They also had a peach sticker that looked like ass. Thus, I am making this joke about Telegram having best UI.
In this meme, Durov, the Telegram founder, says "Colleagues, greetings. Who can make it, so that eggplant cums? Added a task to Notion." Then "employee" sends a cumming eggplant sticker, and Durov replies "This is what I wanted."
Absolutely true.
Telegram: Best UI. Signal: Best privacy. WhatsApp: Largest userbase.
It's interesting to think about these three dimensions. I could theoretically pinpoint everything that make Telegram's UI the best, and copy it. I could do the same with Signal's privacy. Both of these are technical problems. There's a process for becoming the best at UI, and there's a process for becoming the best at privacy. I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Other than the 3 big ones, I recently found Jami [1]
Good UI, though not as good as Telegram. Arguably better privacy than Signal - you don't even need an account if you don't want. Zero userbase. Free software.
[1] https://jami.net/