700M users and Premium

They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client.

As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms.

Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.

I use it for something like 90% of all my social interactions with real-life friends. IMO, Telegram has by far the best UI/UX of any internet chat app. In terms of stuff like group management, working perfectly on any type of device with any OS, including maintaining accounts on multiple devices and keeping everything synced between them, organizing large numbers of chats in the UI, managing notifications, etc. Video and voice messages that just work on all platforms.

It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.

It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.

I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.

Better a GRU-managed honey pot than a CIA-managed honey pot. My country is a vassal to the US, not the Russians, and GRU power over me is considerably less threatening.

All HTTPS connections(most of web browsing last decade) are encrypted to and from the server.

Signal showed us that is possible to have E2E encrypted messaging, why don't they provide it, but with better UI/UX?

If Telegram doesn't read messages and doesn't provide access for 3rd parties(governments, etc.), It should provide E2E everywhere by default.

Many people are asking what are in Telegram that aren’t anywhere else?

I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app.

- It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).

- It is the only app where I add any woman to any group outside of family or other close-knit groups. When creepy dudes get women's cell numbers, it sometimes becomes very difficult for the women to handle. In Telegram, you can be part of large or large-ish groups without the women having to share phone numbers or real names. Blocking is really easy and tension-free.

- The video quality in chats is really high. In Android, only Google Duo came close.

- ONLY chat app in market with an excellent desktop app for Linux. Also Windows.

- I love their non-SJW-everything approach to allowed stickers. Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.

- UI/UX is excellent. Really love chat themes and how I can edit them. Many components are customizable. Chat bubble colors, radii of rounded corners, etc.

- I like the fine-grained control over notifications from different chats (groups and persons).

- I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.

- The simple yet effective image editor is nice. So is the text formatting with no fuss.

- I often use the auto image resize feature to downscale images.

- It is so seamless. It has replaced email when I want to transfer small files to my own devices.

- I am a selectively social person. It's good that even with 700 mn people, not many people are in it. The people with whom I don't want to interact more aren’t yet in Telegram. That's an appeal to me.

- Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.

- SO helped a bunch of HS kids with their Bio study before a big test, the quiz feature was great. SO is not a technical person, and it was easy for her to set up a group, no phone numbers, create quizzes and so on. She loved it.