They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client.

As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms.

Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.

Signal's stance on third party clients is so disappointing. Telegram really has them beat there, although it has to be pointed out that Signal actually publishes server source, while Telegram doesn't.

Well,signal doesn't do it always as well, see the 1 year pause when they added cryptocurrency stuff

still better than not at all, but yeah that whole shitcoin thing made me lose a lot of faith in them

Honestly I found their API one of the worst ones I've ever used. The documentation is lacking, and they have some unintuitive quirks like posting messages with http GET requests and randomly concatenating strings in params (botNAMEOFBOT anyone?).

I didn't enjoy using it without a third party library [1].

Sending a single message is easy, but using the rest of telegram's features is "meh" when using pure API calls.

If you want to see a well designed API, you should take a look at FTX or Stripe. I love those two :)

[1] https://telegraf.js.org

"A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc)"

hmmm ... could I participate fully on Telegram without ever installing the app anywhere ?

That would be compelling ...

Yup, install any third party client or even just use the web client (web.telegram.org).

I’m not sure the signup is available without the app, that’s the only thing.

You can use their web client, so technically no need to install anything except a browser.