How is it that Telegram can manage tablet and desktop apps and a web app that all work seamlessly, while Whatsapp is still stuck with a phone app and a web app that is an awkward workaround?
Does this mean that the design of whatsapp was flawed right from the very start? Did the designers cut corners when rushing out the app just to be first and build that user base, at the expense of long-term viability?
I too am boycotting whatsapp and am in the slow process of slowly converting my friends and colleagues to telegram. This app is awesome.
Boycotting won't work for me (or you guys), my friends will never move, most of my comunication (in the UK) is though whatsapp, all planning, communications with work colleagues, family, different groups of friends. It is so convenient, if you meet a new group of people and want to setup a group chat, almost everyone is on whatsapp so you can set one up and it is platform agnostic.
Whatsapp uses open-source software called Textsecure, so messages can only be unencrypted from the single device that the account is associated with. Read more here.
I believe the way the web app works is that the web client comunicates with the phone. The phone does all the encryption and decryption to the whatsapp servers, as it thje onlt device that can to ensure COMPLETE encryption, as detailed by wired. I've no idea how the android -> web client link is secured though.
So it looks like telegram uses a shared key based encryption method, so anyone with the key can encrypt the messages, so it is a lot less secure. This will use a similar system to iMessage as described in the Wired article
