I’m sure you all have heard about the Telegram. Yes a WhatsApp that comes in Blue. Right.
Okay still give me some background.
Here you go
Telegram came into the market (in 2013) long after WhatsApp (that was launched in 2009). It was great and it’s still great however it hasn’t improved or innovated enough.
Telegram is run by a German non-profit organization backed by entrepreneur and philanthropist Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov. Plus it’s open source — implies it’s a community driven. People like us (when feel the need for new, helpful feature) take the code and develop the features unlike WhatsApp which (perhaps) now needs Zukerberg’s permission (I’ve nothing against him; I’m glad he has developed facebook).
Okay. So What’s your point?
My point is clear — Despite of having an alternative, we’re choosing to live by the inconvenient way. Few efforts could make our lives easier. Just few.
I’ve listed down some pain areas that (I assume) most of us have or have had with WhatsApp
I’m choosing WhatsApp because it’s most widely used plus I don’t have much experience with other applications available.
- I don’t want to show my last seen
- I don’t want to show read receipts
- I don’t mind sharing my last seen with him/her but not all
- I want to search through my chats for few things I or person I was chatting with had shared
- There is no @mention feature in group chat
- I can’t password protect the app
- I can’t access it from my computer
- It slows down if I won’t delete the messages and media
Note: Few of the pain areas listed above are now overcome by new features of WhatsApp. Alternatives were available to overcome those however I’ve considered only App features.
Even today, we face few of the problems listed above. Sure, those will be overcome soon but then despite of having an alternative which can make our life easier, why do we want to stick with inconvenience
Following could be few of the possible reasons (we like to give as humans)
- All my friends are on WhatsApp
- My phone will get slower if I’ll install one more app
- I don’t care about those problems
- Telegram is stolen concept so I’m going to be loyal to WhatsApp
Alright. I agree a bit. So what it is that Telegram provides?
Below are the features that Telegram provides
- It’s meant to be free forever as a non-profit organization runs it
- It’s open source & community driven meaning you can expect the great and most needed features to be released faster
- It has all the features that WhatsApp provides (so your life won’t be stuck that’s a promise.)
- It provides world class level of security
- Its fucking fast (you’ll realize this at the moment you’ll start using it)
- You can share unlimited number of photos, videos and files (doc, zip, mp3, etc) ofup to 1.5 GB
- You can edit the photos as well as videos before sending
- You can send photos without compressing them
- It has web as well as desktop app (that launched prior to WhatsApp’s web app) for all platforms which is one of the best designed app (esp for windows users)
- You can use #Hashtag which can also be used as a @mention feature in group chats
- You can search through all your chats by #Hashtag (never lost anything!)
- It has a secret chat which is end-to-end encrypted ( you wouldn’t care about that much may be) and it has self-destruct mode. You can set the time for all yourmessages to self-destruct so you don’t have to clean up the chunk as a weekend activity! Plus the messages gets deleted from both the devices — sender & receiver (Bingo! Some social work here!)
- It has in-built passcode lock feature
- You can share Last Seen with specific people
- It has @username feature by which you can search telegram user and chat even without knowing his/her number.
- You can change the chat background without having to install external app. It’s in-built.
- Group can be as long as upto 200 members
You can read more about features on their website — https://telegram.org/faq and here is the download link for you just in case.
