Telegram Vs. Whatapp, Who wins? Features, Security, etc...

#discuss

Hello, friends on Dev, which is the best messaging application between these two?. I need the candid opinion of everyone (or anyone) in the community. This (Quora) thread is in favour of Telegram with regards to security. This telegraph and this one also have interesting content.

However, one of many threads on reddit is quite confusing. Can we discuss this?

Top comments (3)

Paulo Renato • Oct 17 '19

In my opinion neither of the two.

I personally only use the Signal APP, and once is open source you can see its code here.

The Telegram App have rolled out they own encryption algorithm and have not made it public, therefore a red flag.

Wikipedia:

Telegram's security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized the general security model of permanently storing all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default.Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecure backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device. Cryptography experts have furthermore criticized Telegram's use of a custom-designed encryption protocol that has not been proven reliable and secure.

Whats App is great but now belongs to Facebook, and its backend is being integrate with the Messenger one, thus another red flag for me, as any thing that comes from them.

Wired:

WhatsApp users, for example, can assume that all of their chats are end-to-end encrypted, but what will happen in Facebook's newly homogenized platform if an Instagram user messages a WhatsApp user? It's unclear what sort of defaults Facebook will impose, and how it will let users know whether their chats are encrypted.

Facebook can also glean more data from unencrypted chats and introduce monetizable experiences like bots into them. The company has had a notoriously hard time earning revenue off of WhatsApp's 1.5 billion users, in part because of end-to-end encryption.