Telegram: The Imperfect Paragon

It's been a while since I analyzed Telegram messenger's state last time and, believe it or not, a lot has changed in the messaging world in recent years:

A lot of mainstream proprietary messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Line caught up with Telegram in terms of some baseline features.
Telegram implemented three financing strategies to support its long-term maintenance and development: Telegram Premium subscriptions, privacy-conscious Telegram Ad Platform and Fragment auction platform integrated with TON.
Some niche messaging apps like Signal became a lot more popular due to various factors, including pandemics, war in Ukraine and ever-increasing number of privacy-conscious users.
Raise of popularity of completely open-source, decentralized and interoperable solutions in form of Matrix/Element, XMPP.

This article is intended to fill the gaps and summarize the current state of the market and Telegram's position in it.

First of all it's crucial to emphasize that I still believe that Telegram is the best messenger overall thanks the combination of the following factors:

Simplicity and incredible speed.
The best UI/UX design.
Superior, scalable cloud architecture with amazing sync capabilities.
Fast, customizable, native applications and lightweight web apps.
Unparalleled feature-set.
Decent privacy and security.
Open official clients, API and protocol.
Impressive limits (including storage, file and chats size) for all users.
Boundless reusability and extensibility with Telegram API, Telegram Bot API and TDLib.
Vast ecosystem: numerous official platforms and third-party solutions.
MAU of 800+ million users.
Interaction with users and community.
Crowdsourcing to find the best specialists and develop the best solutions.

Nonetheless, there are components that could be determined as Telegram's weak sides, especially considering the fact, the company successfully implemented monetization and users now can look at the product more critically than at 100% free service it used to be and whose entire existence and development were generously supported by Pavel Durov's personal funds for over 7 years. So, let's dive deeper into each.

1. Number of bugs and development pace.

Just by looking at Telegram Blog, it becomes evident that Telegram is one of the fastest evolving services and probably the fastest developed messaging app. Thanks to this as well as tons of innovative ideas, Telegram always stayed ahead of its competitors.

Unfortunately, that comes at a high cost, namely gradually increasing number of bugs. If we take a look at issue reports on Telegram Bugs & Suggestions Platform, we'll see a huge number of them, of course there lots of duplicates, a lot are solved, but still a negative tendency is preserved. As a result, all of this affects applications' UX, speed and requires more technical support. Besides, a high pace of development sacrifices optimization, which results in even higher resource usage and heating issues in case of older devices. Some bright examples of this tendency are such app parts as a reaction selector popup, calls, voice/video chats.

Clearly something has to be done in this regard, whether it's slowing down the development pace, improving code quality or implementing more stringent and automated testing process.

UPD: in 2023 situation somewhat improved in this regard

2. Unnecessary features.

This aspect is tightly coupled with the previous one. Telegram is actively developed, dozens of features are added each year. While a big part of them improve the end-user experience, a selected few even become true game changers, but with hindsight, not all of them are really useful or necessary. Some examples include: numerous emoji extensions, emoji status, video avatars, full-screen stickers, downloads manager, stories, profile colors, boosts... One of Telegram's initial objectives was to keep apps simple and fast. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try to adhere to this principle, adding more and more bells and whistles eventually means more complexity and higher performance penalty.

Of course Telegram tries to stay mainstream and cater to wide audience by adding features useful for various groups of people. And yet evolution in nature means not only adding new things or improving existing ones, but also getting rid of redundant and inefficient parts. The same applies to software. Pursuing simplicity is the key to suck less. Unfortunately, modern corporate software industry often on the contrary to FOSS development doesn't understand this simple principle and users end up dealing with software full of over complicated, flashy and often useless features.

The solution to the problem might consist in closer interaction with a community to determine what is crucial and what is not and adjusting development plans accordingly. One piece to this puzzle is already implemented as Telegram Bugs and Suggestions platform.

3. Stability and quality of voice/video chats and calls.

Stability and to some extent the quality of voice/video chats and 1:1 calls was and still is one of the biggest Telegram's pain-points. In terms of UI and UX, they look and feel top-notch, but as far as connection stability and quality a lot is left to be desired.

It's certain that Telegram's priority lies in messaging capabilities, while VoIP and calling features were always secondary. Still to compete and even outshine other messaging apps, it's necessary to fix this shortcoming they don't have.

The solution includes resolving such things in voice/video chats and calls as:

periodic stutters;
accelerated audio;
echo;
quality drops;
delays;
disconnections;
key exchange issues;
low resolution/quality of screen sharing;
poor optimization.

Poor optimization/high system resource usage usually also leads to considerable device heating, lags and stutters.

Not all of these issues happen to all users at the same time, but they still have to be addressed.

4. Technical support.

Launched years ago, as a great community initiative, Telegram Support Force, despite being amazing in theory and most likely sufficient for a simple, bug-free application, has proved to be considerably lacking when implemented and used in a service with hundreds of millions of users. Oftentimes if you're lucky it takes days or even weeks to get an answer in the built-in support chat. Most aren't that lucky and thus don't get a reply at all. It might've been fine for a free service, or something that has zero to no issues, but it's no longer sufficient for an application of such a scale and internal complexity.

The solution: after getting enough revenue, complement TSF with professional support conducted by hired employees.

5. Privacy concerns.

It's a fact that Telegram, even after GDPR regulations have been taken into account, has had fairly simple and and well-structured privacy policy. It's also well known that Pavel Durov's privacy-oriented life view, his history of conflicts with russian government to protect VK user's privacy with subsequent abandoning of the country and his stance on human freedom and freedom of speech increase overall trust in him and his primary product - Telegram.

However, there were reported cases when the messenger disclosed IP-addresses and phone numbers of suspects by court orders even if they were not terrorists. These incidents became harder to track after switching from a global Transparency channel to a new country-specific bot.

Surely, now as one of the most popular global services, Telegram is under vigilant observation of all big governments and it has to comply, or at least imitate compliance with their law-enforced data requests. But it's also important to stay honest with users and stick to core values and philosophy. So, is it still true that Telegram disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties? Can the company stay true to its ideals?

6. Security model.

Telegram uses client-server encryption for cloud chats and client-client (E2E) encryption for secret chats and 1:1 calls. This balanced approach allows to preserve convenience of a first-rate cloud service for most chats with excellent security for individual discussions of highest secrecy. In addition it makes harder to target specific individuals who use secret chats. In case of cloud chats the encryption key is supposedly split into parts stored under different jurisdictions, which protects users from cloud chat data being disclosed on a legal basis. At the same time, cloud architecture allows to simplify or improve several things, including automated spam control, community building, local client storage footprint and serves as a basis for dozens of features. Combined with verifiable client builds, chats auto-delete and support for paid anonymous numbers as long as we trust Telegram and Pavel Durov, the security model should work fine. Additional food for thought could be found in Pavel's message describing his stance on certain security questions.

However, with adoption of decentralized E2EE solutions like Matrix, XMPP, having at least some of similar features, we can also pay attention to questions that raise concerns:

Why secret chats are still not available on Telegram Desktop?
What encryption is used in voice/video chats?
Will there be attempts to develop secret group chats?
Why federation is not possible, or planned?
Why the server-side is still closed-source?

To be fair, there are some arguments covering the last two questions. Speaking of federation, Telegram wasn't designed with decentralization in mind and it's unlikely to change any time soon.

When it comes to balance between security and convenience, there will always be compromises. Telegram's choice of architecture ensured achieving the highest degree of convenience at the cost of having to trust that the company doesn't disclose your data, which despite being tricky is technically possible.

At the end of the day, if you don't trust Telegram, you should either use only secret chats and 1:1 calls for individual communication, or go elsewhere.

7. Spam control.

Another common issue with Telegram is a sheer amount of spam, very common in groups. It's a bane of any popular web service, but freedom and flexibility Telegram offers to its users turns out to be a double-edged sword that also enables spammers with tools to reach their audience. Fortunately, there were taken some steps in this direction like the new aggressive anti-spam option in large groups that will hopefully enhance spam prevention. Only the time will show its efficiency.

UPD: features introduced in 2023 for the most part haven't resolved the problem.

A Glimpse Into The Future

All in all, a new generation of strong, free and open-source competitors gets developed and while they clearly lag behind in some areas, they have their own advantages including interoperability, decentralization, better stability, privacy or security.

At the same time monetization of Telegram that ensures its sustainability and future growth also puts a burden of higher expectations on the service. The messenger market is clearly over-saturated and without truly innovative ideas and solutions, which, for example, were offered by Telegram back in the day, it's hard to impress users and force them into changing their primary communication tool of choice. Security alone isn't a sufficient driving force.

While currently Telegram remains the fastest growing messaging app in the world, if its weaknesses aren't addressed in time, the tide of popularity might turn against it, giving a chance to competitors.

For the time being Telegram stands between two camps of communication apps:

Fully open-source, in some cases, decentralized and self-hosted: Signal, Element, XMPP-based clients, Wire, Threema, Session, Jitsi...
Locked-down, proprietary solutions or even parts of so-called "walled gardens": WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, WeChat, Viber, Line, Discord, Teams, Zoom, Slack...

With gradually increasing awareness about such topics as privacy, security, anonymity, freedom of speech and culture of free and open-source software, it seems not likely for people to favor and switch in the long run to any alternatives from the second category, unless they are already existing users. These services are usually inferior not only in terms of the aforementioned qualities, but also in the context of numerous other Telegram's advantages.

However, the first category of apps, which for now have much less users, features and polish, is the one that could burst into popularity in the future and win over the market due to unique qualities that set them apart in eyes of educated, tech-savvy people, whose number inevitably grows by the day. And even providing that some of these apps have less features, if they are user-friendly, simple, fast enough and have all the expected basics nailed, each could turn into a formidable opponent. After all, features and their number isn't everything, sometimes less is more.

Therefore, in my opinion, the only way for Telegram to not only become a leader, but also survive the test of time, is to fix its shortcomings, evolve and transform into even more open, secure and decentralized force, managed by global community. Thankfully, one milestone to such survival, that is monetization strategy without privacy invasion has already been attained in year 2022.