Huh! Just yesterday I was fed-up with Textsecure being so buggy and bad that I looked at the Telegram homepage and thought "nice" apart from not completely being free software (or is it?). It says "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct." which made me believe that all messages are heavily encrypted.
Now this post says "By default, messages (...) are logged and stored on Telegram's servers". Damn.
I was spending far too much money sending SMS messages to my friends overseas. A few hundred per month at EUR0.12 each starts to add up pretty quickly. Data is cheap, so instant messengers tend toward being almost free.
Telegram has official clients for my FirefoxOS phone and for my Linux desktop.
I've never used their secret chats. I appreciate their open source nature and am happy to support them.
This is exactly the problem with the communities "greater than though" tone toward anything non-EU/US engineered. The Telegram client is open source. Threema for example is NOT. WhatsApp for example, is NOT. Facebook Messenger, is not. Telegram appears to have the right balance in getting real peer review from having the system open source and verifiable while also garnering this huge animosity which has lead to even more review. As far as I can see Telegram and TextSecure are the only clients where the protocol can be verified through the open source client. I'm not advocating for its use but I'm sick of the misconceptions.
Now this post says "By default, messages (...) are logged and stored on Telegram's servers". Damn.