Comment by Kinrany

When criticizing Telegram, I wish people focused on the actual smoking guns and didn't include random fluff one has to cut through.

As a Telegram user, my current impression of the platform is that they are a tiny elite team, they focus very heavily on creating a polished product, and are somewhat arrogant about all of that.

The most common criticism that I see and understand is the lack of E2EE by default. But I'm not aware of a messenger that provides a good UX for that. For most people, losing access to the account is a much greater risk. (The trade-off has changed somewhat now that everyone is getting hacked by AI and thus Telegram's whole dataset leaking becomes a concern.)

The criticism that I agree the most with is phone numbers being used for authentication. Even if Telegram still wants to know everyone's phone numbers for growth reasons, as far as I'm aware for authn phone numbers are strictly worse than emails.

On the positive side, they still have a proper API, open source their clients and allow third-party clients. All of which seem non-optional for any messenger that claims to prioritize security.