Telegram gets a lot of flak for this, but if what they're saying here is true, I believe that it's a pretty sane architecture: https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...

Definitely a better alternative to WhatsApp in any case.

That page starts by claiming that Signal doesn't do backups which is false.

Signal's backup is different than what Telegram provides, based on what I read on their webiste: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

On Telegram, login on a new device and you can see your all messages automatically. On Signal, you seems to need to perform it manually, and your history will lost forever if you phone are lost or broken.

I think the first kind of "backup" is what most people would expect, because it is convenient. But to provide this convenience, it can't be full E2E, so Telegram supports secret chat when you need max security if you are willing to sacrifice convenience.

You can get the same convenience with the Signal/Whatsapp E2E type of app. All you need additionally is to keep a passphrase stored somewhere. As long as you do that you can have automatic backups that allow you to setup a new device without access to the old one and get all your history back, without losing the E2E encryption benefits by having unencrypted backups on a server somewhere. Signal UX for this is poor though.

That page, is also an article from 2017 :-)

I, too, from some other comments in this thread, just found out that chat history transfer has been a feature since June 2020: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21280664/signal-chat-trans...

That's an iOS specific new feature. Signal has had backups for a long time now.

The backup feature is not new.

The article is from 2017 and Signal added backups in 2018.

My Signal message history goes back further than that but maybe the feature was added midway before I switched phones.

Nothing prevents Telegram from not implementing that architecture and reading every single group message and non-secret chat. Telegram is sketchy in many ways, I wouldn't trust that easily.

Genuinely curious to know why you think Telegram is sketchy in many ways?

Because the founder is Russian and Russophobia is very strong in the USA and Western Europe.

People find other reasons for this (“they made their own crypto”, “marketing says secure but it isn’t by default”) but the core of the argument is that Pavel Durov is Russian and he’s not trusted. If it had been Elon Musk who had created it- I have little doubt that it would be the hottest thing on the market.

Good read, thanks for that link.

And you cannot use e2e chats at all on desktop or GNU/Linux phones.