I switched all of my friends and family to telegram in 2013. I deleted it 2 months ago. 10 years.
Telegram was so great. Always cutting edge, released so many features before anyone else, and the app always stayed extremely lightweight. What broke the camels back for me was them destroying transfer speeds for free users.
I have 1gbps internet connection, and videos and photos take FOREVER to download and send on telegram. Trying to send a short 30 second clip on telegram takes a good 90-120 seconds, even on the lowest compression.
Meanwhile snapchat and other apps take 3 seconds and look better?
They are trying to push their premium so hard, which is fine, gotta pay, but I'm sorry there's no chance in hell all of my friends and family are paying $7 CAD each per month.
At this point I've just switched to RCS messages for all of my Android friends, and Snapchat for my stubborn iOS friends.
For a long time it was ran on money that Durov made from VK and it's selling deal and had no ads, almost perfect development. It was a ton of money obviously, but we all knew it would run out sooner or later and then everything would change. I bought premium once because I wanted to support the project, and I still use it. Hopefully I won't have to use anything else, because I hate almost any other messenger.
Everyone else here is forgetting that Telegram is still pushing the limits and it's still one of the best app for messaging (the best in my opinion though), if they're recurring to this, it's because money aren't unlimited.
Shut the hell up you people: Telegram still isn't invading privacy and using anti-user practice, the hell you complaining about?
Thank you. I would love to support telegram with premium because they've done so much in the past couple years but can't because I can't buy premium where I live.
The main thing that frustrates me is not being able to turn off the emoji interface in their official app.
Serious question - isn't snapchat an absolutely horrible messaging experience? The messages literally disappear, the app is shit, and the messaging interface is shit. And you can see when someone is actively reading the message. I hate all of that.
Do people seriously use it for day to day messaging with people?
Well I don't really care to save chat logs from my friends. If they send something "important", I can save it in the chat so it never disappears, or I can screenshot it.
They only disappear after 24 hours unless you save them by tapping on them. Depending on your relationship, that could be a good thing. I mean Telegram added disappearing messages for a reason.
Yes, millions and millions of people use it daily. It's the easiest way to send videos and photos to friends. I send so much stuff to my girlfriend and vice versa that doesn't sit in my messenger and clog it up. Meanwhile my Telegram chats are full of tens of thousands of photos and 99.9% of them are garbage that I wish didn't exist still like selfies of me making stupid faces.
I'm not acting like snapchat is private, or that screenshots don't exist. They do, I don't care. It's just nice that if I send my friends a stupid selfie, or my girlfriend a lewd, they are not sitting in their messenger for them to come across a few months or years later making shit awkward.