MessengerComparison Freeze

The project is going to be put on hold due to three primary reasons.

1. Ideology. Initially the comparison has been started in order to show how an open-source, 100% free, privacy-respecting and generously funded, but less popular Telegram was in almost every single way better than popular commercial proprietary alternatives like WhatsApp and Viber. Nowadays, despite still being open-source (clients, API and protocol) and for the most part free, Telegram not only became quite popular and incredibly fast-growing, but also established means of its financial survival that bring a considerable revenue. It still has better privacy and security, but now similar to other two has to think about the balance between ideals and processing various data requests in order to avoid being blocked and preserve market share.

2. Direction. While Viber and especially WhatsApp evolve much slower, all three have expected communication basics implemented and now each follows its own development direction. Architectural limitations don't allow Viber and WhatsApp to transcend the boundaries of mere IM apps on the contrary to Telegram, which added to concept of messaging and messaging app so much depth and variety that nowadays it could be used for a diversity of purposes and use cases. At the same time it doesn't seem like Rakuten and Meta corporations have plans on radical architecture changes, or open-sourcing their software to confirm their claims about "ultimate security", which means that that gap in this regard will only increase down the line. Nevertheless, Telegram has a different kind of issue, the team develops too fast, which results in unnecessary features, new bugs, lack of optimization, higher resource usage instead of paying more attention to common shortcomings. As a result, a value of knowing every single feature and difference across the three considerably decreases.

3. Coverage. Unfortunately, unlike Telegram, Rakuten and Meta don't dedicate enough efforts to highlight updates and changes introduced in their apps, which makes it harder to track and update the comparison table accurately. As a result, in certain areas parts of information about Viber and WhatsApp are likely outdated, which also over time decreases the value of the project.

Conclusion

To sum it up, the comparison project has served its purpose by raising awareness about Telegram and facilitating its popularity.

Nowadays it's one of the most popular communication/social platforms that has commercial funding and a number of means to express its advantages including Telegram Blog, Durov's Channel, Telegram Tips, Telegram News, Telegram Premium channels, Telegram Evolution article and more. These are sufficient for users of any other messenger to compare their current experience with what Telegram has to offer. As a result the messenger no longer needs extra publicity and coverage from fans like myself.

If you still need a summary of Telegram advantages and its main shortcomings, please refer the following article:

https://telegra.ph/Telegram-The-Imperfect-Paragon-01-06

That said, anyone interested in the detailed messenger comparison continuation or reusing its assets for other communication apps, feel free to fork, modify and improve the existing FOSS solution.