Telegram is an amazing instant messaging app that has an edge over its rivals, mainly due to a single factor: privacy.
The privacy that Telegram offers, thanks to its MTProto protocol, remains to be unrivaled, as claimed by its developers.
And that is what we’ll be starting with, in this compilation of the features that give Telegram an edge over WhatsApp, and a lot of other IM apps as well.
Privacy
An open-source project, Telegram’s source code, protocol and API can be read and analyzed by anyone.
The app only stores the data that it needs to and only for as long as it needs to. As the developers claim, till date, they have no shared any data to a third-party, not even the government.
In fact, the app only stores the first and last name of the contact and the mobile number and no other details.
- Secret chats
A beloved feature of the app, secret chats provide end-to-end encryption meaning that without an access to your device, there’s no way that a third-party or Telegram can find out the content that you have sent.
The media sent using Telegram in a secret chat, looks like indecipherable garbage to anyone on the Telegram team, even though it’s on their servers. The media is first encrypted using a key that’s not known to the server and then the file’s location and media are encrypted again and sent to the recipient who has the key.
This random data is periodically removed from their servers for saving space.
- Self-destructing messages
In secret chats, messages can be timed to self-destruct, as soon as the message is received, a countdown starts and once it finishes, both the devices are instructed to delete the text/media.
The media sent to be self-destruct later, has blurred preview and as soon as they are viewed, the countdown begins.
- Account self-destruction
If you do not login to Telegram for at least 6 months, along with your account, your media, messages, contacts and any other kind of data that you’d stored in the app, will be destroyed. You can also change the time period after your account will self-destruct, by going to the settings menu.
In the wake of the recent privacy scam of Facebook, related to Cambridge Analytica, it is obvious that the faith of the users in WhatsApp’s privacy has been shaken.
On the contrary, Telegram was recently in a feud with the Kremlin (Russian government) when it refused to hand-over the encryption keys to them. As a result, Russia banned it and Pavel Durov, the founder, still kept working on ways to allow the Russian users to access Telegram. As a result, the Russian users gathered and flew paper planes (the symbol of Telegram), to protest against the ban.
Bots
Telegram doesn’t just have bots of its own, but third-party developers can also develop their own bots and host them on Telegram.
This is the reason that Telegram has a lot of bots like @wiki, @IMDb, @gamebot and others which help in making your life easier and also helping you share links/GIFs and a lot more with your contacts.
This is the one feature that WhatsApp doesn’t have and we believe it won’t ever be having it anytime soon. Unlike Telegram, WhatsApp is not an open-source program that will allow third-party devs to operate on its platform.
Telegram Super groups
The supergroups allow Telegram users to add 100K members to their Telegram groups, unlike WhatsApp which allows only 256 members.
Also, these supergroups load quickly and are optimized to handle the large number of messages and media.
Upcoming Cryptocurrency
This one is still on thin ice and we’ll have to wait for it to come out to be sure, but Telegram has been planning on launching its own cryptocurrency, something we know that WhatsApp will never do.
Conclusion
While Telegram falls short on users when compared to WhatsApp, it has a host of features which make messaging easy, fun and secure which is why, we believe that yes, it’s not going to be long before Telegram’s user base becomes at least half of WhatsApp’s.
