Comment by Klonoar
2 days ago
I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.
(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)
> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple.
I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
> This is not entirely true.
My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).
> I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy
Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?
> then do what's needed to support it
What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!
> Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good
This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
This is such an odd comment.
What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this.
Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers.
Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
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> What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security?
Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.
Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).
So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
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Telegram certainly has an excellent UI/UX. On the Element side, its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X - and (in my biased opinion) we are getting very close, if not exceeding it in some places. For instance, we just landed The Event Cache in Element X and matrix-rust-sdk (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 - closed 2 days ago after a year of solid work), which provides seamless offline support and local encrypted-at-rest caching of the messages it's seen, which in turn then makes the native SwiftUI and jetpack-compose UIs go brrrrrr.
> its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X
I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now.
i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).
Arathorn I'm a bit confused that Element pushes Element X so much already when your own Element One service doesn't support it yet?
It's just because all the effort has gone into EX over the last ~2 years, and it's a way way way better app (even if it doesn't have threads/spaces yet).
Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.