alt Hacker News> I believe they have put the most love into their user interfaces out of all the chat programs I have seen
Absolutely true.
Telegram: Best UI. Signal: Best privacy. WhatsApp: Largest userbase.
It's interesting to think about these three dimensions. I could theoretically pinpoint everything that make Telegram's UI the best, and copy it. I could do the same with Signal's privacy. Both of these are technical problems. There's a process for becoming the best at UI, and there's a process for becoming the best at privacy. I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Other than the 3 big ones, I recently found Jami [1]
Good UI, though not as good as Telegram. Arguably better privacy than Signal - you don't even need an account if you don't want. Zero userbase. Free software.
Replies
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
Easy: Be at the right spot in the right time and be lucky to be noticed.
WhatsApp had one smart idea: tying accounts to phone number, which solved detectability, while SMS where expensive in many regions. When ICQ/AIM still missed the mobile market and before Apple made iMessage.
Easy to replicate, as we can see with Facebook messenger or Google's different attempts, who invested quite a few resources into that.
I tried Jami for a bit with a friend. For both me and my friend, Jami was very unreliable about delivering notifications about new messages. So my friend would send me a message but because I didn’t get any notification about the message it would go days before I opened the app and saw that he had said something, and I’d respond to it and it would be days before he would happen to open the app again because he also didn’t get any notification.
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.
I was at WhatsApp from 2014 - 2019. Growing a large userbase from scratch doesn't happen by any one factor. You have to do a lot of things well. (and probably get lucky)
a) potential users need a compelling reason to join. Messaging at data rates was significant, but not in the US were many people had large messaging allowances. Works better than SMS/MMS was compelling for some.
b) existing users need to be satisfied enough to stay: service has to work consistently, client has to work, etc.
c) signup flow needs to work well. Doesn't matter if people want to use the app if they can't. You need to help users understand their phone number (or other identification). You need multiple methods of verification, because SMS doesn't always work. Giving someone a several digit code over the phone is a cognitive task for the user, and it's harder with disjointed speech generation, so you need to spend some time on that too. You need multiple providers because if you can't get verification codes to users, some of those people will give up and never come back. Since you have multiple providers, you need to figure out how to pick one based on current conditions which you also need to figure out how to track. Also --- you need some money, sending all these codes gets expensive. Phone numbers as ids is a blessing because "everyone has one" and you can use the system address book for contacts, but verification costs add up; usernames or email as id make contact discovery messy and a surprising amount of people in the developing world don't have an email address or don't know what it is.
d) users get new phones, a lot, you need to make it easy to move their account. Or they will likely drop your service when they get a new phone.
e) you need to be prepared for and handle large events. If some big news happens, people will want to talk about it. If some similar service has an outage, you will get more traffic --- if you also fall over, that's a lost opportunity.
f) things need to work well on the devices people actually have. Which might not be the ones you would prefer to use. Worldwide, most people don't have flagship phones. If you want a large number of users, having good experiences only on recent flagships is self limiting. Working well (or at least better than alternatives) on low end and older devices is a path towards addressing users that others miss.
There's probably more. Most of these require sustained consistent effort to deliver. It's not a one time thing. And it's not quick. Sustained consistent effort is easy enough as a one product start-up, but it's very hard as a big-corp.
Userbase can be a positive feedback loop: once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join ... and having no one to talk to is a reason to leave. There's not really a way to jump start it, unless you've already got a large user base somewhere else that you can use to seed your service.
Part of "good UI" is not having E2E, which e.g. gives you sync that actually works, even on new devices, with no weird backups and PIN codes necessary, just like the good old days.
How did we end up with this mess of disjoint chat systems each with their own userbase? Doesn't it indicate that this market desperately needs regulation? Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?
Either you provide message interchange with any other message system operating in a specific country or you can't advertise or sell anything in this country (also app stores must country wide ban). Bootstrap by taking two largest chats and offering them provisional access to the market for few months. If they can provide interchange between them they can remain and others can follow. If not bigest one is out, let's say for two years and the third one (pre-ban) tries to establish interchange with the remaining of the two biggest.
Jami is so useless that never recieved messages after few hours. And there is no way you can make it work properly for longer duration.
Just bear in mind that Signal's goals are in tension with the other 2 pole's goals.
does Jami store messages server side like Telegram to enable access to messages everywhere?
> Telegram: Best UI
Hard no. Have you tried activating encryption in personal chats?
I shudder to think about calling Telegram UI "good". Maybe chats like Discord spoiled me but both of those feel like way below level of "comfort" for communication longer than "asking about what food you want", especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting.
Both look ass at desktop too, way too many wasted space, tho Telegram at least doesn't stretch the chat on the entire width of monitor when in fullscreen, having to go from far left to far right just to read the chat
Telegram is also the best at first class support of all the platforms it runs on. In addition to the Qt-based app that's popular on Windows and Linux, the predominant client on macOS/iOS is AppKit/UIKit-based, and there exist numerous other native clients (such as UWP/WinAppSDK on Windows, GTK on Linux, and CLI for anything with a command line).
In comparison everything else puts reasonable effort into the mobile clients and phones in the rest with bloated, half-baked web apps or if you're lucky an iOS Catalyst port.
Along with UI/UX quality, this stuff matters and impacts adoption, even if most users can't put their reasoning into words.