Telegram does not support video calls and WhatsApp has a group limit of 256 people. But beyond slight differences, usability is the same.
However, they have unevenly conquered the world, and Facebook’s green chat is gaining market share. Although it has been branded as insecure for some time.
This is how chat apps spread the world
According to data from Similar Web , as of April 2016, WhatsApp controlled 55.6% of the global market . Countries like Russia, Kazakhstan, Spain, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, India, Pakistan, all of southern Africa and absolutely all of Central and South America were theirs. 109 countries. Russian-born Telegram had only two: Iran and Uzbekistan.
By early 2019, WhatsApp had already reached 133 countries, although Telegram had continued to grow by adding Ethiopia, according to We Are Social . Remember that behind the green chat is Facebook, along with Facebook Messenger in 75 countries. That means Zuckerberg’s network controls 84.89% of the countries in the world.
This global distribution has set off alarms along with scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the changes announced from Facebook for a more private world. Are WhatsApp conversations private?
Is WhatsApp an insecure application?
When compared, Telegram is often portrayed as a safer app versus WhatsApp . The truth is that both encrypt their messages from end to end in direct conversations. That is, between two participants.
Although Telegram came later, it and Signal “forced” Zuckerberg’s chat to update its security, which, to this day, is still deficient in many of its points. For example, Telegram does not require us to give our personal phone number to a stranger.
That is, we can configure our own access PIN.
But one of the most criticized vulnerabilities of WhatsApp is undoubtedly the lack of encryption in the cloud . End-to-end encryption is of little use if the backup is unprotected. In the case of Telegram, nobody can access the chats: not a cracker, not the police, not even the Telegram staff.
If we talk about app permissions, both are quite consistent. WhatsApp needs access to storage to save chats, to contacts to search for acquaintances, to the camera to take photos, to the microphone to record. Although it also requests SMS permissions (what for?), phone or location . These last two are also requested by Telegram.
security of Telegram
Telegram provides a series of additional security options. For example, protect the chat from screenshots or set the keyboard to incognito mode . When this occurs, it does not collect usage data.
In addition to this, the metadata that Telegram collects compared to WhatsApp is not too much. Zuckerberg’s chat is dedicated to saving usage history, IP, operator, location, etc. We wondered for a long time how to prevent being spied on WhatsApp , but not how to prevent WhatsApp from spying on you.
Privacy is better protected on Telegram, there is no doubt. The latter also has a very interesting possibility: the unilateral deletion of messages . If you don’t want the other party to continue to have access to the conversation, you can delete it.
Why do You still use WhatsApp?
It is vulnerable, monopolistic in nature and belongs to one of the big internet companies that does not seem very inclined to release our data . Any reader might think that the person who signs these lines will give a twist and sell the Telegram installation because it is their reference chat.
It is not. I do use Telegram, but there are so few users that it is more of a support at work. And it is that WhatsApp chat was the first to reach a huge number of countries. This has meant that its constant vulnerabilities have not achieved a massive change to other chats. He has become resilient.
Basically it’s normal. If all your family, your friends and your co-workers use WhatsApp, why would you use Telegram? You already have your network. For many users it doesn’t make sense to have “duplicate apps”.
And from a security point of view, neither: better a big vulnerability than a big vulnerability followed by a small one . Winner-takes-all , and WhatsApp may continue to grow in number of users.
Not everything on Telegram is so pretty
Telegram is arguably more secure than WhatsApp , but not everything is so pretty on the web. When the company itself was born, with GPLv2 and GPLv3 licenses, he argued in his favor that the app was open source. But is not.
It is true that many client applications are, and an open source library was even released in 2018 for developers to customize Telegram. But the app itself is not free, only a (large) part of it . This has to be taken into consideration.
Open source applications , if they reach a certain critical mass, are much more secure than those that do not show their code. The reason is logical: vulnerabilities come to light very quickly and are corrected in a matter of hours. Zero-day vulnerabilities are less frequent breaches.
However, Telegram is sold as a 100% open app when, in reality, it is not. This penalizes its adaptation to new vulnerabilities , and it loses some strength against WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
