I might have the wrong impression but Signal has always seemed to me to be uninterested in user requests. They are privicy first & user experience second.

There have been lots of Signal forks with a variety of features the official client refuses to add or merge.

Well, sort of. They have their idea of what they want (approximately "security for the masses"), and if your pull request doesn't go in the same general direction they don't care about it. If it does, they're positivish but they still aren't eager about fixing your code.

FWIW I've had one (very small thing) accepted and another not. That second wasn't a net positive if "security for the masses" is the only important goal.

what was the thing that was rejected?

I fixed handling of multiple SIM cards on MediaTek's forked Andoid, which had added multiple SIM support before Android itself did. There were bugs in the MediaTek code but Signal could be made to work. However, the code I wrote to make Signal work looked risky; it seemed possible that it might break something on other phones.

And this is why I use Telegram, for them UX matters.

Yes MTProto is not audited blah blah. I use IRC too and that has exactly butkus for encryption :D

People only ever mention Signal because of the security by default. Telegram does not have that, their encrypted rooms are something you have to go out of your way to create.

In signal you cant delete/forget contacts... And groups will haunt you to the end of days too. I started to strongly distrust signal after I learned that. It's meta information nonetheless and invites for identity fraud.

But yeah, Telegram can't be trusted either. I hope matrix/element will replace both soon.

Sorry, this doesn't make sense. You certainly can delete chats and leave (and subsequently delete) groups (by swiping left on the chat/group name in the chat list). How do they "haunt" you?

Matrix needs better clients...

True story, I've been using Matrix with Element for a while. I don't use it for anything much because no one else is on it. Some friends and I have a groupchat on Signal and we decided it would be good to have a backup method to chat if Signal breaks (or to just move to for the reasons that there are, such as not being centralized by design).

It took me at least twenty minutes to figure out how to add my friends to a room I created too long enough ago to have memorized the UI. And they added "Communities" which I created one of but cannot even tell what functionality it even provides.

I don't know if that's a client issue or not but it seems like (maybe?) it's trying to be a social network in addition to a chat app? Some kind of adding in Discord functionality or something?

I guess as long as I can not use social network features and still use it like I use Signal... to flexibly chat with whomever I know the ID of.

Thats true, Telegram has very good UX. But bullshit crypto with a closed server etc. :-(

Indeed: signal proves that good UX and good security can coexist.

Telegram proves that to have even better UX, you need to sacrifice security (and privacy).

I don't think the latter is true. It feels like the Signal team just isn't interested in taking on work (even work done by others) to improve the UX.

I can understand that they have limited funding and want to focus on the security features first and foremost, but that makes it really hard for me to get some of my friends to use it.

Having said that, I agree that Signal's UX is not bad, just that it could be better.

Stuff like multiple clients with shared chat history is a huge pain in the ass for full proper end to end encrypted chats. This is why whatsapp web uses your phone as a proxy and signal does some janky shit to work on multiple devices.

Telegram went UX first and turned down the crypto so that I can install Telegram on a fresh laptop and I've instantly got the same chats, with history, as I do on my phone.

I assume that means that Telegram, and any government with jurisdiction over it, also has your chats?

MTProto has been audited multiple times.