I have both Signal and Telegram and although I don't use as much Telegram to say this with absolute certainty, but Signal definitely has issues on all platforms I use (Android, macOS, Linux) - not deal-breakers, but issues. Telegram on the other hand has had none thus far.

I'm curious to know what issues you have with Signal on Android. I use Signal on Android daily and I haven't had problems with it for a few years now.

That and it's dead easy to write a bot.

It's pretty easy to write a bot for Signal too, if you're willing to run a daemon:

https://pypi.org/project/pysignald/

yup. i wrote a simple one for my group of friends (i was also playing around with asyncio for the first time) and it took me less than an afternoon.

Desktop is a first class citizen, so much that encrypted chats aren't supported yet.

That's not accurate, it's supported on one of the two desktop clients.

Ah, you mean the one for macOS only. No, I was talking about the multiplatform one.

Encrypted chats are just useless on telegram