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I used to mainly use Telegram but their broken notifications on Android turned me off. If a chat app can't get notifications right, it's not worth using.
Telegram's notifications are the best among all apps. It works perfectly. If you view a message on desktop, it also removes the android notification.
Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
I found Durov's plans to monetize Telegram most interesting. https://t.me/durov/142 Team features (competing with Slack/Discord?), ad tools for telegram channels and premium stickers. Whilst keeping all the existing Telegram features.
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As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going.
For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings. However, with its current growth Telegram is on track to reach billions of users and to require appropriate funding. When a tech project reaches this scale, typically there are two options – start earning money to cover the costs, or sell the company.
Hence the question – which path will Telegram take? I’d like to make a few points to clarify our plan:
1. We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. Telegram must continue to serve the world as an example of a tech company that strives for perfection and integrity. And, as the sad examples of our predecessors show, that is impossible if you become part of a corporation.
2. Telegram is here to stay for a long time. We began developing our apps for our personal use over 8 years ago and have come a long way since then. In the process, Telegram changed the way people communicate in several aspects – encryption, functionality, simplicity, design, speed. This journey has just started. There’s much more we can – and will – bring to the world.
3. In order to make points 1 and 2 possible, Telegram will begin to generate revenue, starting next year. We will do it in accordance with our values and the pledges we have made over the last 7 years. Thanks to our current scale, we will be able to do it in a non-intrusive way. Most users will hardly notice any change.
4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.
7. If Telegram starts earning money, the community should also benefit. For example, If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size. Or, if Telegram introduces premium stickers with additional expressive features, the artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users.
This is the Telegram way.
It will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come. We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users. While doing that, we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate.
Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
I think it adds a great amount of value, I can have a group discussion and plan things in real time instead of a slow async discussion.
Especially for online games, a async communication would be terrible. ;)
Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? That sounds wrong to me. Do you have a source for this?
There is literally a website for this specifically ( https://dontkillmyapp.com/ ) created by the Urbandroid team (creators of Sleep as Android). Rather annongingly, the team started out due to problems encountered on HMD/Nokia phones, since acknowledged and partially fixed ( https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-... ). Personal anecdote: even Google have been wishy-washy between different versio…
But I had this whole reply typed up for iOS so, may as well include it:
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I can only speak for iOS, but it definitely doesn’t work this way on iOS.
The ability to run in the background is something you can grant to any app, and there’s no special treatment of any one third party app versus another.
It’s not unlimited though even if you do grant the permission... if they use too much memory in the background they may be killed, and there’s a limit to how long they can stay running in the background.
Push notifications are supported anyway, because the apps servers are supposed to deliver push notifications to APNS, which delivers them to your phone on behalf of the app even if the app is closed.
But the transition from “app is running in the background and notifies you” (which can’t last forever) and “app is killed but the server delivers a notification through APNS” (which works when the app is dead) is often implemented poorly by developers and isn’t seamless. It’s hard to get it right.
But no third party apps get treated any different in this regard.
Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
It's very useful. It adds value, since during this kind of conversation one can offer useful suggestion or another point of view on an issue that they hadn't addressed before (because they were working on something else, for example).
Different use case: incident handling with tight time constraints. In other words: prod offline and has to be brought up asap, but coordination is needed in touching the various systems. A 2+ people voice call is a godsend because now everything is "in sync" and usually updated in real time with what other people are doing.
Your opinion is not unpopular, is just the product of an HN-like echo chamber. People advocating of async-only communications are a small minority that makes a lot of noise, it's a common situation.
Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
No mention of any kind of encryption?