The simplest explanation for this is the fact that the desktop apps are native apps and not based on the massive and sluggish electron framework.

I don't think this necessarily has to hold true (Discord for instance have implemented their apps really well), but in reality this holds true for most electron apps in my experience.

As a heavy discord user, its performance is just nothing compared to a native app (gtk etc). Its notably not native in performance

True, but it is acceptable rather than having a noticeable delay etc. which I observe in other apps.

I don't know - clicking links seem really sluggish in discord - both on Android and on my surface 4 pro. It's odd, clicking on an image link in a browser is instantaneous on either device.

It has a lot of noticeable delays, they're just hidden by the interface.

Could just be me, but the Discord app is full of glitches and random pauses for me. The app is better on my phone, but on several Linux distros the feel of the application is just off to me. Switching servers and channels has a tiny but noticeable delay that I haven't seen native applications have.

Unfortunately, there aren't many native applications any more. At this point I'd prefer a Windows application that works in Wine over yet another "cross-platform" Electron webbrowser-with-builtin-website.

> Discord for instance have implemented their apps really well

No they haven't. The discord electron app is a trash fire. I use discord in Safari. It's just as bad UI and UX and slowness as the electron crap, but at least I get a few more hours of battery life...

Since I removed the electron garbage from my phone, my battery life tripled from one day at most to three days...

Discord is unusable at times too. But compared to other Electron shits, Discord is above average when it comes to performance. But in the end, when compared to Native apps, performance wise, Discord is still shit. It's nowhere near Telegram.

Even for a native app it seems to be well developed because, on Windows, for example I have it running at the moment and uses 25mb of ram, the most I've seen it at was 45mb.

This is so accurate I feel like I can just die now.

Recently I migrated off Whatsapp like many others and the Linux desktop experience is really good, in particular the performance of search impressed me. Compared to the Whatsapp Web client it is much faster. If I'm not mistaken it's a Qml + Qt app which is actually very pleasant to write. Not sure why not more stuff is built with it these days.

It's actually Qt-widgets if I am not completely mistaken. Also, the reason why not more companies do this is unfortunately cost, it's much easier and thus cheaper to just cobble together some electron trash.

It would be of such niceness if telegram was fully end-2-end encryption.

That's exactly what secret chats are.

I am still waiting for the day when I can initiate a secret chat from my desktop client.

At least on macOS you can

Group chats are not encrypted.

They are encrypted, but not e2e. It is a key distribution problem.

Threema solves it by scanning QR codes; for that, you need to physically meet with the other recipients, they need to bring their devices and scan each other QR codes (note that Threema still supports only one device per recipient; otherwise, the users would need to scan each other QR codes for each device).

It is not something that an average Telegram user would be willing to do.

The nice thing about TG, you can make your own custom client (without getting sued) and implement PGP over it; or whatever you want

what about being federated?

Their mobile app is fantastic as well.

Telegram truly has set a high bar for chat app UI/UX. I'm hoping something secure manages to a achieve that level as well.

It is very nice indeed. I only wish some keyboard accessibility was better.