I wouldn’t consider Telegram a well-done cross-platform app. It’s a mobile app, badly ported to desktop, and I find telegram-desktop quite annoying under Linux. Here are most of the ways where there are actual problems, quite apart from it just using foreign UI design paradigms that make it not fit in:

Its keyboard accessibility is very poor: about all you can do is switching between conversations, scrolling inside a conversation, posting messages, and editing recent messages. You can’t interact with any buttons, menus or popups that they open.

Its text editing fields (plain and rich text) get caret navigation wrong for the platform, e.g. Ctrl+Right moves to the start of the next word, rather than the end of the current word; and punctuation is treated as a separate “word” rather than being grouped with a preceding (in the direction of navigation) word.

Its rich text editing component (for sending messages) doesn’t let you format text while typing: “hello, <Ctrl+I>world” should make the second word italic, but that Ctrl+I doesn’t actually do anything: you have to type “hello, world”, then go back and select “world” and press Ctrl+I. (This is by far the most frustrating of the issues, resulting in me mostly just not formatting messages.)

When I type emoji in (via a Compose key in my case, but it’s hardly the only way of typing emoji natively), they appear as rectangles, and stay that way until you post the message or type a character before the emoji, at which point it swaps it for a graphical emoji.

If you don't consider telegram a well-done cross platform app, then what are your standards? There is literally no other app that is as X-platform as telegram. Nothing by MS, Facebook, Google, Apple or any other company in the world comes close to releasing an app for Every mobile and desktop platform. On top of that, Telegram is better in performance and offer far more features than competitors who release in fewer platforms... FOR FREE. There are so many more things to praise before thinking of any criticism about emojis not looking right before sending in Linux desktop lol.

> If you don't consider telegram a well-done cross platform app, then what are your standards?

How about allowing e2e encryption on desktop?

It’s a business decision, has nothing to do with cross-platform quality of client app.

But it does decrease the quality of the app on specific platforms.

I don’t know if there are any in this sort of space that I would consider well-done. But I do know that a single-codebase mobile app port to desktop is unlikely to ever qualify, even if in some other regards it’s excellent.

> foreign UI design

The unified-UI battle is long lost. Nowadays, I much prefer a sane style instead of whatever RAD design GNOME/Windows11/etc people have come up with....

> Emoji

IIRC, the compose key uses a limited set of old emojis. I've been using dmenu-wrappers for inserting emojis, like this one: https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji

The points you mentioned are minor issues (I know, it adds up) but compare that to the alternatives: Discord, Slack, Element, Whatsapp...Mere starting up those apps and sending a `hi` to someone easily could take ~30 secs

Many times, the sluggish experience in Discord caused me to just ignore joining in my favorite servers and discussions.

On the UI side, telegram-desktop does things in a radically different way from typical desktop software, that’s my objection, structuring things in a way that only makes sense on small-screen devices.

The Compose key can be customised via ~/.XCompose. I’m talking about things like U+1F928 FACE WITH ONE EYEBROW RAISED. Anything that has a graphical representation gets mangled.

On the alternatives: I haven’t ever tried much in this space, so I don’t know if there are any that I would consider well-done. Performance is probably the biggest objection to many of them.

not disagreeing with any of your problems, but i guess the point was that there are barely any other significant mobile messengers that also _have_ a desktop app, let alone one that is snappy.

Disclamiar: telegram user on windows, linux, ios and android

The web interface for WhatsApp is really good. Fast and simple and the main thing I miss in Signal and Telegram.

just out of curiosity; what are the benefits of the WA-webinterface over a native client? (yes, e2ee yadada, but really)

I can run it in a firefox tab, and I don't have to install anything or do another login/sync.

good point, thou telegram also has a (ordinary) web-interface https://web.telegram.org

You can't use it without your phone connected (to the same network), which in my case is a no-go.

this!

consumer and soho routers are usually bridging wifi and lan together whereas professional and enterprise tend to run seperate networks, mostly for security reasons.

Just for reference, gitter.im did just that a while back. It's really nice to be able to join a gitter channel using a client of my choice and not a crappy web interface.

(Although gitter.im isn't really a "third-party" adopting it, given they were aquired by Matrix developers: https://blog.gitter.im/2020/09/30/gitter-element-acquisition...)

Oh, that's interesting. I did not see any amount of money in those blogposts, do you have an idea how much it cost?

Also it appears Gitter is actually not operating a matrix server, but is instead bridged with https://www.matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/native-gitter-br... ? Does that mean gitter.im is only reachable from matrix.org?

Personally when i had to join a gitter room, i would join from my XMPP account using the @matrix.org gateway (which despite being unreliable is very nice) so i have no clue.

Some of the Matrix folks are active on HN, maybe they mentioned something in the discussions back then? But I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't much if anything - my impression was that Gitlab didn't really know what to do with gitter, so giving it to messaging-focused project would make some sense.

No, bridged rooms generally are reachable from any instance. It's just that the bridge talks to matrix.org and matrix.org "hosts" (that's not 100% accurate afaik to how Matrix works, but close enough for this) the room just like any other matrix.org room, that is also reachable from other instances.

From what I know, they are still bridging, but in the long run (I assume they are somewhat waiting for stable Dendrite, since Synapse is shit for massive deployments) I believe they want to run an actual homeserver in gitter.im and have a sort of Gitter themed/branded Element client for it.

This is already the case. There is an actual matrix server reachable @gitter.im and you can join gitter rooms through it

ah thanks for that information! it was not apparent from the blogpost/docs about it on matrix side

The clients are open-source [0], maybe they'd accept contributions?

Worst-case a fork could work.

[0]: https://telegram.org/apps

There's already a bot that bridges Telegram chats to Matrix.