Telegram review: another messaging app

When WhatsApp updated its privacy policy in 2021, thousands of users jumped ship in search of a more privacy-conscious app. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this phenomenon has been Telegram, a messaging app that has gained a huge following, with more than 700 million users by early 2023.

Telegram is slightly different from many of its competitors. In addition to the standard messaging features, it offers some unique features that most other messaging apps do not.

Learn about some of the app’s key features in this Telegram review.

Messaging
Obviously, the main purpose of any messaging application is to send messages. Not surprisingly, Telegram does this in a very similar way to other messaging apps. If you’ve used WhatsApp before, you’ll know how to use Telegram.

When sending a message, you can add content other than text. You can add photos and videos from your photo library, or take one right from the app, and Telegram offers some great photo editing tools that you can use before sending an image, including coloring, vignetting, and even a tilt-shift tool.

You can add files up to 2 GB, and since Telegram saves your conversations on its servers, you don’t have to worry about large files clogging up your phone’s storage. Simply clear the cache on your phone and you can re-download files from your chats whenever you want. If you don’t have much space on your phone, this is a convenient way to store large files.

You can also share your real-time location during a chat. You can choose to share your current location, or set your location for up to eight hours, which means anyone in the chat can see where you are and where you’ve been. Contact information can also be shared in chat, and you can create polls, but only in group chats.

Of course, you can add GIFs, although it’s not as easy as it is on some messaging apps. Before searching for the desired GIF, you need to click on the “Stickers” icon and then select the “GIF” tab. Alternatively, you can use the GIF bot by typing @gif followed by a GIF search term.

Group Chat
As well as one-to-one chats, you can create groups where multiple people can chat together – apps such as WhatsApp and Signal cap the number of people in a chat at around 1,000, but with Telegram, it’s up to 200,000.

Group chats allow you to send text messages or make voice or video calls. Up to 30 people can participate in a call, and up to 1,000 people can watch without joining.

Another way to interact in a group by voice is to create a voice chat. This allows anyone in the group to talk at any time without having to answer the phone. Anyone in the group can join and leave voice chats, and anyone in the group can listen without having to participate.

Channels
Channels are like groups where only one person can talk. The creator of the group can post content, and anyone subscribed to the group can see that content. However, they can’t reply; it’s a one-way street. Channels are a great way to promote your business or keep people up to date on the latest news without losing the message in a flood of replies.

Unlike group chats, there is no limit to the number of people who can subscribe to a channel. You can search for channels through the Telegram app, but it’s not obvious how to do this. On the main chat page, you will need to scroll down to reveal the search field. Searching in this field will bring up a range of results, including media, links and files, as well as Telegram channels.

The terms of service state that you should not post “illegal pornography” on publicly viewable Telegram channels, but it didn’t take long for the search to find channels containing pornography.

A more efficient way to find channels is to search online – there are websites that specialize in directories of Telegram channels. If you want to join a private channel, you need an invitation link.

Creating your own channel (either public or private) is as easy as creating a group. Create a new channel, name it, invite some contacts or send an invitation link and start posting.

Bots
Telegram bots are basically small applications that run in Telegram. With Telegram’s Bot API, developers can build their own bots for use in Telegram. This has led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of bots that offer a wide range of different uses.

Some bots can send you alerts and reminders, some bots can allow you to make or receive payments, some bots can bring you the latest news, and some bots can allow you to send messages at specified times. Some of these bots are very useful, which is a big reason why people choose Telegram over other messaging apps that don’t offer bot integration.

While bots can add some very useful features to Telegram, you should also be aware of the risks involved. Security researchers have found that Telegram bots don’t use the same encryption technology used to protect your chats, and Telegram has published a rather scathing blog post refuting these findings, pointing out that if you can crack HTTPS, you should be able to steal billions of dollars from banks.

But why use MTProto 2.0 encryption for Telegram messages if HTTPS is secure enough to protect your bot data? Our advice is to use bots at your own risk and not to share any sensitive information such as card numbers or bank details.

Secure
Telegram uses client-to-server encryption rather than the more secure end-to-end encryption used by competitors such as Signal and WhatsApp. You can start a secret chat with end-to-end encryption, but this only applies to one-to-one chats, and if you do, you can only access the chat on the device that started it.

Telegram also uses its own proprietary MTProto 2.0 encryption instead of the more tried and tested Signal protocol used by Signal and WhatsApp. Previous versions of this protocol were found to have security flaws, although these have been addressed in the current version.MTProto 2.0 is open source, but the encryption used on the server is not. This is an issue because Telegram uses client-to-server encryption, which means that your data is more vulnerable to attacks on Telegram servers.

Privacy
Telegram’s privacy policy states that it can collect and store some metadata about you, including your IP address, information about your device, and the Telegram applications you use. It can also store a history of username changes. This information can be retained for up to 12 months.

A 2021 FBI report indicated that security services may have access to some of this information, and Telegram has indicated that it may provide information such as IP addresses and phone numbers as part of verified terrorist investigations. This information can be used to identify you.

The Telegram application also collects a large amount of information that may be linked to your identity.