That's technically not true - it's not end-to-end-encrypted by default.
But yes, it is a design choice - telegram puts usability first - see all their innovations with large groups, stickers etc -, even at the expense of some privacy (i.e. no e2e-chats). But that's why you can have Telegram open on every device you own and probably why they are the second largest chat app by now.
Signal, on the other hand, values privacy first, everything else second. This is why this bug is open for 6 months - they see your chat log as a convenience feature and mostly a burden. In addition, Signal is a smaller team with less funding, so that their UI is not as polished is partially also due to lacking manpower, but its simply not a priority for them.
Other apps may provide higher anonymity, but none provide privacy guarantees higher than (or even close to) Signal.
So, being "best" at privacy is meaningless unless you are in the very lucky position that your local jurisdiction fits Signal's threat model. There aren't many in the west even...
Signal has taken measures to limit its ability to know who I'm sending and receiving messages from. Though it's still possible by mapping my IP address to me. So yes there is still a centralized metadata problem, but I'm not letting perfect stand in the way of better.
Not in most cases, for most people, most of the time. Everyone knows you communicate with your family, friends and business associates. Very few people communicate out of those groups and even if they do they rarely have to worry about anyone finding out about it.
- Using phone numbers means that Signal can constantly check against your contacts to let you know if any of your contacts are now using Signal. As such, using phone numbers encourages use of Signal.
- The usage of phone numbers instead of email or usernames also helps combat temporary/fake account creation abuse, as phone numbers are KYC if you ban VoIP numbers
That said, in the end it is a compromise on privacy and anonymity to increase the popularity and stability of the app.
I'm more concerned about every day privacy, and Telegram is far better on them. Do you realized that you sent by mistake some data to the wrong people? In Telegram you can delete or edit every messages you want whenever you want.
Don't you want to share your phone number in a group? In Telegram your phone number is hidden by default, meaning that other group members doesn't see you number unless you share it with them.
Also Signal is open source but not really open. In Telegram you can use whatever client you want, in Signal you are forbidden to use anything else than the official client. And the official client is open source, but it depends on proprietary services, like the Google Play services on Android, so you really can't use it on a 100% open source system. You can't even find online the Signal apk by their choice, so the only official way is to install it from the Google Play Store (and how do you verify that the apk that Google provided to you doesn't contain a backdoor?)
For a lot of people, that's exactly the concern.
> Also Signal is open source but not really open. In Telegram you can use whatever client you want, in Signal you are forbidden to use anything else than the official client.
There's nothing in open source that requires people running services to allow anyone to connect to it however they like. You still have the freedom to inspect, modify, run and distribute both the server and client, so it's to see what part of that in "not really open".
> And the official client is open source, but it depends on proprietary services, like the Google Play services on Android, so you really can't use it on a 100% open source system.
I agree, this is annoying. But it depends on your threat model and it seems that most people don't see Google as the threat to protect against.
> You can't even find online the Signal apk by their choice, so the only official way is to install it from the Google Play Store
https://signal.org/android/apk/
> (and how do you verify that the apk that Google provided to you doesn't contain a backdoor?)
>In Telegram you can delete or edit every messages you want whenever you want...
Remember the furore when Amazon were caught deleting books off people's Kindles? Everyone was rightly outraged by that. Yet so many people think it's a great idea that Telegram allows other people to arbitrarily delete content from your devices.