Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat

narwhal@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 86 points –
Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat | TechCrunch
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One marketing executive's "super" is another man's "crammed full of crufty garbage that nobody wants."

I use and love Telegram. I use almost all of its features. All of its clients are open source. It has an incredible API for writing bots (which I also do). Their desktop Linux app is native! When I'm traveling I use Stories to share the experience with friends and family. I love the new topics to separate group discussions. It's the one app I've been able to onboard absolutely everyone to. I was never able to do the same when I tried to with Matrix and you only get so many chances before people stop moving.

What is crufty garbage to you?

Stories. Why they are in a messenger? Especially in such a pesky way.

They’re pesky? It’s the only messenger that has them but has them tucked away completely unintrusively. I‘m not a fan of stories but in Telegram I‘ve barely noticed them…

Heavy user of telegram myself. It is by a country mile the slickest, leanest, most UI guideline-adhering, quickest app to use, on all of its platforms.

Sounds like a bunch of crap I don't want, and they're adding more crap according to this article. And if they are indeed going the way of WeChat, becoming a "super app" and partnering with Chinese and crypto companies, that makes me very nervous about privacy.

Not sure if you’ve used WeChat or any of the telegram app-platform features … it’s just web code that gets loaded in on demand. It’s not like the app is built with all this shit by default, it just loads customised HTML-like code when you activate an app.

.....and then everything you do and say gets monitored by the CCP......