> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is going to be a terribly cynical comment, but I've noticed a trend here on HN to introduce laws to fix problems.
The short version is that, no, you can't law yourself out of this (or pretty much anything. )
Firstly, laws have national jurisdiction. There are no "all the countries agreed to this" laws.
Secondly, the US can't actually pass any laws anyway. Congress is deadlocked. It can't even get around to killing daylight saving clock changes (which passed the senate with unanimous support.)
Plus any laws (or, more recently executive orders) just end up in court forever. And when passed may, or may not, be enforced (or enforceable. )
And that's before I point out that big tech buys (sorry, "lobbies") govt in the first place. Apple, Meta, Google would all pay to make this bill go away.
Lastly, everyone seems to forget that interoperability leads to spam. Email is open and completely flooded. SMS is open and basically unusable. Whatsapp grew their user base in part because the experience was spam free. So even if laws declaring openness were proposed they would be far from universally supported.
> 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?
Why do you assume that the regulation that would actually get passed by the actual government would result in effective chat interchange between different protocols, and not just entrench some existing platform while making it technically illegal for another organization to try to compete with them?
> 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).
Would this make it technically illegal for me to use F-Droid to install an open-source implementation of a novel chat protocol that doesn't support interchange with existing chat platforms yet? Does this make it possible for me to force existing chat platforms to be suddenly illegal by releasing a novel open-source chat protocol without coordinating it with those platforms?
> Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?
Probably not, but email is a heavily-flawed protocol, so I'm not sure that's a good thing. Also, although email was invented in the 1970s, making it one of the oldest internet protocols still used, it's been extended over the years, and I'm sure at least some of those extensions were developed by various for-profit companies (perhaps ones which no longer exist).
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.
This is sadly a ubiquitous problem with FOSS phone software. Google's and Apple's notification systems are anti-FOSS. You can use your own on Google phones, but then your app will have to wake up periodically to check it, and the system will detect your app as a battery waster, tell the user your app is a battery waster, and automatically prevent your app waking up to prevent battery waste. And on Apple I believe you simply can't do that because they user has to open the app to wake it.
> 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.
Of all the things you listed, which are surely important, you also said the single most important factor in the end:
> once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join. There's not really a way to jump start it
So, a monopoly that was lucky enough to be the first one to solve some (minor, if I may) technical problems.
We need forced interoperability. Facebook has no right to control the communications of so many billions of people, just because Whatsapp got lucky and then facebook acquired them.
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.
E2EE can work just fine with backup and sync. Signal chose not to do it for a long time and remains cautious, sticking to security over tolerating security-ignorant users.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions. It being closed-source changes nothing about its feature set.
These days, Signal supports (encrypted, even cloud) backups just like WhatsApp or any other messenger.
The problem with UX for many of these apps is that they're designed for people who want to be sure that the government can't read their messages, but that's not something that's possible without compromising on the ease-of-use of SMS and other insecure methods. It's foolish to try to shove a Signal-shaped app into a SMS-shaped hole. I believe Signal's mobile app and (with a better underlying protocol) Telegram's cross-platform UX offer the best mix of secure and safe by default.
> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions.
and it causes no end of pain when you switch phones (esp. if you loose one).
Of all the chat services i use, Telegram is the only one that NEVER, EVER LOST ANY OF MY MESSAGES. Maybe for some people privacy is more important ; for me, not loosing any message I have under absolutely no circumstance is the n°1 baseline requirement for something to even be called a chat app.
Partly, but Signal etc. could just as well have a fast and polished client, and Telegram a clunky electron sloth. Even if you restrict yourself to one device (so no syncing) the difference in quality is undeniable.
Using Molly to get cross-device Signal support works pretty well, though the Android-only approach requires Waydroid or a deprecated Windows feature to run on desktop, unfortunately. Still, it's a lot better than the alternative (which from Signal's side seems to be "none, be glad we support desktop sync at all").
jami doesn't store message on a server, at least not in 1:1 connection. It is one of the Achille heel in the sense that if you send a message, your recipient is offline, then you go offline before your recipient goes online the message will not have been delivered and will wait until both are online at the same time. It is particularly annoying because most android firmware + iphone kill the app when it is in the background so that people tend to think it is the app that is not working well whereas it is really the operating system that aggressively kill it and prevent it from working well.
A workaround for the messages not being received is to have an opened session on the desktop version running 24/7 at home.
I read that group chats (swarm) are implemented using git and I think the changes are pushed between clients directly. Again it is nice if you have a permanent group to have at least one client running 24/7
It has the option of doing that, it asks you if you want to enable the backups.
It also allows you to encrypt the backups with a passkey or a password that you can manually set, client-side.
It didn’t always have the encryption option I think.
In one of the early releases of animated emoji on Telegram (I want to say the very first one), it did. Then Apple objected and it stopped. Then shortly afterwards like half of the rest started doing something suggestive but not the eggplant. A lot of fun was had on the Internet imagining the product meetings for all of that.
(Not that any of it is particularly relevant to the quality of Telegram’s UI, which is indeed unmatched.)
Basically, Telegram used to have eggplant sticker that cums, until Apple forced them to remove it. They also had a peach sticker that looked like ass. Thus, I am making this joke about Telegram having best UI.
In this meme, Durov, the Telegram founder, says "Colleagues, greetings. Who can make it, so that eggplant cums? Added a task to Notion." Then "employee" sends a cumming eggplant sticker, and Durov replies "This is what I wanted."
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
> especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting
Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)
I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)
And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.
If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)
Discord UI is abysmal, especially on mobile. Every time I start it I shudder, stare at a stuttering UI that takes way too long to become responsive. It feels like it will make my phone explode.
QML is a great language to make GUIs. A few years ago I tried XAML, and it honestly kind of sucked in comparison (the verbosity alone made it painful to work with). I haven't tried Slint UI, but supposedly their DSL is even better since it fully compiles to native Rust code.
I found QML to be a terrible language for making GUIs. I really tried with it. But it just felt so hacky and unfinished. A couple of examples (from like 10 years ago so forgive me if I got some of the details a bit wrong):
1. Child components can magically refer to variables in their parents. This is basic encapsulation 101. The only other language I know of that allows that is SystemVerilog and that's from an era where people didn't know better (especially hardware guys).
2. You can create custom widgets... but they can't display text! There's a class called something like QmlSceneGraphTextNode that is the way that all the provided widgets display text but it's private. I guess they might have fixed this eventually but it stayed private for the ~5 years I tried to use it. They wanted me to just use Label widgets in QML land which sucks.
It also felt like there was a pretty huge impedance mismatch between QML and C++ due to its use of Javascript. E.g. stuff like using 64-bit integers. That reminds me:
3. It uses Javascript.
4. I never found a good way to use dialogs. They seem to push you towards having all possible dialogs exist all the time and just showing and hiding them, which is kind of crazy.
I don't think the idea of a GUI DSL is fundamentally bad, but QML is certainly a pretty miserable implementation. Hopefully the Slint guys have learned all of these lessons.
It uses JS like the early web did: for little pieces of logic here and there. It isn't based or structured around, and certainly not made of, JS. It's fine. I don't like JS neither, but I do like QML.
Also, feel free to use QtWidgets for desktop apps, it's IMO the better technology for that unless your data is simple and you want it to look like a typical touch UI for some reason.
Jetbrains CLion is great for non-Qt C++, albeit paid. It helped me deliver a bank-exchange-grade connector in a tight schedule with very little knowledge of C (at that time). Mostly with static checking, compiling, cmake etc.
I agree Qt Creator is really good, and VSCode with the Microsoft C++ extension is probably not quite as good.
However with the Clangd extension it is much much better. Even better than Qt Creator. 100% accurate C++ code intelligence, really really fast error squigglies. Honestly I was kind of surprised it's even possible to get it that good.
It's not quite on the level of Dart (which is basically instant and perfect), but I'd say it's on the same level as Rust at least in terms of responsiveness and reliability.
I like this and would like it to continue! FOSS chat UX is, in average, not good at all in my opinion. I don’t need an exact copy of Telegram, but something with a similar amount of care put into it (which is a lot!).
> There's currently no Matrix to speak of, but it's the thought that counts.
Welp! I was going to ask about it. I’m curious how that goes because Matrix is the natural thing to support, but I’ve been quite critical of that being too hard to actually do. The Rust SDK supposedly provides a lot of support here, so maybe the experience won’t be too bad. Some inherent protocol stuff may still limit the UX and I‘d love a thorough writeup on it.
Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint or egui or Tauri or gpui or Iced. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No double and triple languages like this C++ mess. Definitely not GTK or the other non-imperative subpar things. There is one option. Until there is more than one, Qt is the best. No one else is worried about this missed opportunity.
I'm the OP, and I have to pitch in here. This comment is a bit unhinged, basically claiming that every WIP GUI library written in Rust sucks on principle. This is false, and there are some very good ongoing efforts that will probably be great and desirable GUI options in the future.
Also, the comment claims that QML is not Qt. QML was added to Qt in 2009 and has been where a large proportion of the developer's focus has been ever since. It is absolutely Qt and you can't claim otherwise.
A bit of a passionate response to a passionate parent comment.
I am seeing that you are writing a matrix client UI basically which is nice but I am interested if its possible that you could write it in (agnostic?) UI way if if it makes sense, where I can swap out any other protocol instead of matrix too
I was just interested in something similar once and there are other protocols like session,simplex,signal etc. too which I feel like can definitely benefit from an unified UI perhaps
Personally I am always interested if any messaging app should just create a cli application/api and have someone else create the UI since I feel like the UI bugs and similar can definitely be fixed if its not in house.
I am curious of your opinion regarding it but the project looks cool!
Personally although I can enjoy telegram's UI, nothing beats cinny's UI ever.
Cinny has the best UI of any messaging app I have ever seen personally, there are only very few things I wish to change in that, which can be changed via userstyle and even recent modern element feels good to me personally but cinny is brilliant overall
So I am interested to hear what your thoughts are on cinny too (cinny.in)
I needed a simple chat UI for a diy "SMS gateway" (for an extra [nearly free] phone number used only to receive SMS - mainly for registrations and deliveries) and I ended up using Delta Chat that uses your email server under the hood. So I implemented all the logic based on emails... but it would be much better to have some nice looking UI with easy integration.
Oh yes! I had heard of pidgin but only had people use it for IRC/XMPP but I didnt know it was an universal chat client.
Yes you are absolutely correct, basically pidgin but with telegram's UI (or cinny's UI can be good too) but yea, thanks for pointing out to the resource again! I didnt know it was universal chat client, thanks for helping me know that.
You could just use libpurple to do all the im stuff and literally just write a user interface. That said, purple 2 isn't really designed for modern chat networks, but we're trying to solve that with the still unreleased purple3.
That's great work. Thanks for sharing. I was wondering is there a good way of mixing rust and Qt but I decided that this wouldn't make sense... But I'm used to generate C++ code from uic, and have little experience in qml.
Hey, I'm the author of the post. Thanks for reading! Appreciate it :)
I think QML is very easy to get started with and you should just give it a go. It's not without its weirdness as other comments have already mentioned, and unfortunately there's still many controls that are less-than-ideal for desktop applications than their original QWidget equivalents. Using QWidgets+UIC is nice, but in my experience creates problems when you want to get fancy and custom with your design, with animations and shifting layouts and whatnot, well, especially after using QML.
> found out that VS Code was running cargo check one way while in the terminal cargo check was doing some other thing, and effectively blowing the cache every time I switched from one to the other
I have a similar problem with JetBrains RustRover. For example when I do cargo build and cargo clippy in the terminal after RustRover has done build it seems to start over rebuilding more things than when I edit something in vim and only use cargo from the terminal.
Yeah I found the same thing. The issue turned out to be that something in my `.bashrc` was appending to `PATH` (or some other env var). Because my `cargo build` commands that were running in one more level of shell than Rust-analyzer, it had different env vars and therefore a different cache key.
Once you fix it so that Rust-analyzer sees the same env vars as your shell then the issue goes away. It's kind of annoyingly hard to debug though.
It would be great to create a torrent like protocol for chat. People would host for their own circle of friends with some central hosting option for non technicals.
I think a self-hosting option for IM that's better than XMPP could be nice... that said, not sure if something like torrent would be good. I gave a lot of thought to something similar for emails, and the biggest issue came down to, it would be difficult to do something anonymous, distributed, and resistant to flooding/poison pill attacks.
Torrents themselves work against this, because you have known hash values as part of seeding... with email and messaging, you wouldn't have one-off advanced knowledge, and if anyone can send anyone a message, you'd be open to a flood of messages from what seems to be randos. There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse.
A federated system that's otherwise tethered to a domain/email or similar would at least allow for self-management and/or block listing techniques to work better in practice.
> There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse
I get about one scam message per week on Telegram. And the annoying thing with Telegram is that it’s a paid feature to be able to make it so that only your contacts can send you messages.
Additionally, in order to block and report the sender, I first have to open the message, which sends a read receipt to the sender. Which in turn, if the scammers are smart, is something that they make note of automatically.
So one can presume that every time I open a scam message to block and report the sender, as I do, I am also giving the scammers confirmation that this number is actively in use and my number will keep being included in lists of numbers that they and others send scam messages to.
I think your emoji pop up thing looks better then Telegram's. There's has way too much animation with all the emoji bouncing around. Yours was nice and clean.
> 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.
[1] https://jami.net/
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.
> 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.
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.
This is going to be a terribly cynical comment, but I've noticed a trend here on HN to introduce laws to fix problems.
The short version is that, no, you can't law yourself out of this (or pretty much anything. )
Firstly, laws have national jurisdiction. There are no "all the countries agreed to this" laws.
Secondly, the US can't actually pass any laws anyway. Congress is deadlocked. It can't even get around to killing daylight saving clock changes (which passed the senate with unanimous support.)
Plus any laws (or, more recently executive orders) just end up in court forever. And when passed may, or may not, be enforced (or enforceable. )
And that's before I point out that big tech buys (sorry, "lobbies") govt in the first place. Apple, Meta, Google would all pay to make this bill go away.
Lastly, everyone seems to forget that interoperability leads to spam. Email is open and completely flooded. SMS is open and basically unusable. Whatsapp grew their user base in part because the experience was spam free. So even if laws declaring openness were proposed they would be far from universally supported.
> 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?
Why do you assume that the regulation that would actually get passed by the actual government would result in effective chat interchange between different protocols, and not just entrench some existing platform while making it technically illegal for another organization to try to compete with them?
> 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).
Would this make it technically illegal for me to use F-Droid to install an open-source implementation of a novel chat protocol that doesn't support interchange with existing chat platforms yet? Does this make it possible for me to force existing chat platforms to be suddenly illegal by releasing a novel open-source chat protocol without coordinating it with those platforms?
> Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?
Probably not, but email is a heavily-flawed protocol, so I'm not sure that's a good thing. Also, although email was invented in the 1970s, making it one of the oldest internet protocols still used, it's been extended over the years, and I'm sure at least some of those extensions were developed by various for-profit companies (perhaps ones which no longer exist).
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.
This is sadly a ubiquitous problem with FOSS phone software. Google's and Apple's notification systems are anti-FOSS. You can use your own on Google phones, but then your app will have to wake up periodically to check it, and the system will detect your app as a battery waster, tell the user your app is a battery waster, and automatically prevent your app waking up to prevent battery waste. And on Apple I believe you simply can't do that because they user has to open the app to wake it.
Not just FOSS. Many corporate apps have exactly the same problems with notification delivery. Those systems barely work.
On Android you can use UnifiedPush so just one app gets background permissions and it wakes everything else up. Chat apps are starting to support it
I never had that experience because I never found another person with Jami.
> 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.
Of all the things you listed, which are surely important, you also said the single most important factor in the end:
> once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join. There's not really a way to jump start it
So, a monopoly that was lucky enough to be the first one to solve some (minor, if I may) technical problems.
We need forced interoperability. Facebook has no right to control the communications of so many billions of people, just because Whatsapp got lucky and then facebook acquired them.
Who knows how much data they harvest.
> things need to work well on the devices people actually have
Until 2025, WhatsApp was even on KaiOS
That's great, thank you.
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.
E2EE can work just fine with backup and sync. Signal chose not to do it for a long time and remains cautious, sticking to security over tolerating security-ignorant users.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions. It being closed-source changes nothing about its feature set.
These days, Signal supports (encrypted, even cloud) backups just like WhatsApp or any other messenger.
The problem with UX for many of these apps is that they're designed for people who want to be sure that the government can't read their messages, but that's not something that's possible without compromising on the ease-of-use of SMS and other insecure methods. It's foolish to try to shove a Signal-shaped app into a SMS-shaped hole. I believe Signal's mobile app and (with a better underlying protocol) Telegram's cross-platform UX offer the best mix of secure and safe by default.
> WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, for instance, and it's used by billions.
and it causes no end of pain when you switch phones (esp. if you loose one). Of all the chat services i use, Telegram is the only one that NEVER, EVER LOST ANY OF MY MESSAGES. Maybe for some people privacy is more important ; for me, not loosing any message I have under absolutely no circumstance is the n°1 baseline requirement for something to even be called a chat app.
Partly, but Signal etc. could just as well have a fast and polished client, and Telegram a clunky electron sloth. Even if you restrict yourself to one device (so no syncing) the difference in quality is undeniable.
Using Molly to get cross-device Signal support works pretty well, though the Android-only approach requires Waydroid or a deprecated Windows feature to run on desktop, unfortunately. Still, it's a lot better than the alternative (which from Signal's side seems to be "none, be glad we support desktop sync at all").
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?
They all store messages server side.
jami doesn't store message on a server, at least not in 1:1 connection. It is one of the Achille heel in the sense that if you send a message, your recipient is offline, then you go offline before your recipient goes online the message will not have been delivered and will wait until both are online at the same time. It is particularly annoying because most android firmware + iphone kill the app when it is in the background so that people tend to think it is the app that is not working well whereas it is really the operating system that aggressively kill it and prevent it from working well.
A workaround for the messages not being received is to have an opened session on the desktop version running 24/7 at home.
I read that group chats (swarm) are implemented using git and I think the changes are pushed between clients directly. Again it is nice if you have a permanent group to have at least one client running 24/7
Not whatsapp afaik
- Send a message to someone whose phone is off
- turn off your phone
- get that person to turn their phone on
- they receive the message.
Where was it stored, if not in WhatsApps servers?
Once it's delivered, is it still stored?
Well, not exactly what I meant.
Burn your phone, setup a new phone, log in, view your messages was what I meant.
.... That also works? Unless you believe that your entire chat history is magically encoded in a QR code...
works in Telegram (without e2ee) and Matrix (with E2EE), my question was about Jami
Whatsapp backs up unencrypted messages to Google cloud on Android and whatever it's called for Apple.
The government can just ask them to turn over those. (note that this is legally very different from forcing someone to unlock a device)
It does not just do that, no.
It has the option of doing that, it asks you if you want to enable the backups. It also allows you to encrypt the backups with a passkey or a password that you can manually set, client-side.
It didn’t always have the encryption option I think.
Defaults are powerful.
> Telegram: Best UI
Hard no. Have you tried activating encryption in personal chats?
"Telegram: Best UI"
https://i.imgur.com/YDaP5EH.gif
I see "content not viewable in your region". Did I miss the joke or something? I never had that experience in Telegram.
Are you in the UK? Here, hopefully Cloudflare isn't blocked for you
https://pub-aff931c6a6424ddbaff3eccef55f4ae1.r2.dev/IMG_7372...
Guys, can you make an eggplant that cums. I don't get it.
In one of the early releases of animated emoji on Telegram (I want to say the very first one), it did. Then Apple objected and it stopped. Then shortly afterwards like half of the rest started doing something suggestive but not the eggplant. A lot of fun was had on the Internet imagining the product meetings for all of that.
(Not that any of it is particularly relevant to the quality of Telegram’s UI, which is indeed unmatched.)
Basically, Telegram used to have eggplant sticker that cums, until Apple forced them to remove it. They also had a peach sticker that looked like ass. Thus, I am making this joke about Telegram having best UI.
In this meme, Durov, the Telegram founder, says "Colleagues, greetings. Who can make it, so that eggplant cums? Added a task to Notion." Then "employee" sends a cumming eggplant sticker, and Durov replies "This is what I wanted."
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
> especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting
Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)
I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)
And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.
If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)
[1] https://telegram.org/blog/unread-replace-2x#and-three-more-o... (it didn’t even make the headline!)
[2] Just found out (via the comments in https://bugs.telegram.org/c/52) that this actually exists on desktop too: Alt-click the chat. Argh.
>Maybe chats like Discord spoiled me
Discord UI is abysmal, especially on mobile. Every time I start it I shudder, stare at a stuttering UI that takes way too long to become responsive. It feels like it will make my phone explode.
We are comparing it to WhatsApp that lags (very significantly) on keyboard input and doesn't even have a way to paste code.
QML is a great language to make GUIs. A few years ago I tried XAML, and it honestly kind of sucked in comparison (the verbosity alone made it painful to work with). I haven't tried Slint UI, but supposedly their DSL is even better since it fully compiles to native Rust code.
I found QML to be a terrible language for making GUIs. I really tried with it. But it just felt so hacky and unfinished. A couple of examples (from like 10 years ago so forgive me if I got some of the details a bit wrong):
1. Child components can magically refer to variables in their parents. This is basic encapsulation 101. The only other language I know of that allows that is SystemVerilog and that's from an era where people didn't know better (especially hardware guys).
2. You can create custom widgets... but they can't display text! There's a class called something like QmlSceneGraphTextNode that is the way that all the provided widgets display text but it's private. I guess they might have fixed this eventually but it stayed private for the ~5 years I tried to use it. They wanted me to just use Label widgets in QML land which sucks.
It also felt like there was a pretty huge impedance mismatch between QML and C++ due to its use of Javascript. E.g. stuff like using 64-bit integers. That reminds me:
3. It uses Javascript.
4. I never found a good way to use dialogs. They seem to push you towards having all possible dialogs exist all the time and just showing and hiding them, which is kind of crazy.
I don't think the idea of a GUI DSL is fundamentally bad, but QML is certainly a pretty miserable implementation. Hopefully the Slint guys have learned all of these lessons.
3 makes me not wanna use Qt anymore.
It uses JS like the early web did: for little pieces of logic here and there. It isn't based or structured around, and certainly not made of, JS. It's fine. I don't like JS neither, but I do like QML.
Also, feel free to use QtWidgets for desktop apps, it's IMO the better technology for that unless your data is simple and you want it to look like a typical touch UI for some reason.
Fortunately you can still just use QtWidgets. You just don't get fancy animations.
> Qt Creator is actually very good, perhaps unexpectedly so for those who haven’t used it
This. I can't abide VSCode. I instead use Qt Creator for all my C++ development.
Jetbrains CLion is great for non-Qt C++, albeit paid. It helped me deliver a bank-exchange-grade connector in a tight schedule with very little knowledge of C (at that time). Mostly with static checking, compiling, cmake etc.
Just in case anyone has missed the news: since May 2025 CLion is free for non-commercial use.
I missed it too
However I guess that in the case of Jetbrains this means you get your code infiltrated and stolen to teach the AI on
I would personally use qtcreator over clion (and in fact, I do) for not qt c/c++ projects.
It’s just a great ide. Using qt has nothing to do with making it a better or worse ide.
I agree Qt Creator is really good, and VSCode with the Microsoft C++ extension is probably not quite as good.
However with the Clangd extension it is much much better. Even better than Qt Creator. 100% accurate C++ code intelligence, really really fast error squigglies. Honestly I was kind of surprised it's even possible to get it that good.
It's not quite on the level of Dart (which is basically instant and perfect), but I'd say it's on the same level as Rust at least in terms of responsiveness and reliability.
Qt Creator also supports clangd: https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-preferences-cpp-clangd.h.... Personally, I haven't tried it yet.
Nah, it isn’t much much better. It’s at best the same.
Clangd is clangd. It integrates the same everywhere.
I meant Clangd is better than Qt Creator's native code intelligence. I haven't used it for years so I didn't know it integrates Clangd now.
Me too.
Until having language specific features really lost to AI auto complete, and now it's some vscode flavor.
No love for KDevelop? :)
Fellow QtCreator user here :)
I like this and would like it to continue! FOSS chat UX is, in average, not good at all in my opinion. I don’t need an exact copy of Telegram, but something with a similar amount of care put into it (which is a lot!).
> There's currently no Matrix to speak of, but it's the thought that counts.
Welp! I was going to ask about it. I’m curious how that goes because Matrix is the natural thing to support, but I’ve been quite critical of that being too hard to actually do. The Rust SDK supposedly provides a lot of support here, so maybe the experience won’t be too bad. Some inherent protocol stuff may still limit the UX and I‘d love a thorough writeup on it.
The GUI situation in Rust is dreadful: https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...
Rust is simply not meant for GUI-based data design but I still want Qt in Rust. That's it. Not QML or Slint or egui or Tauri or gpui or Iced. No markup at all. None of the immediate mode things. No double and triple languages like this C++ mess. Definitely not GTK or the other non-imperative subpar things. There is one option. Until there is more than one, Qt is the best. No one else is worried about this missed opportunity.
I'm the OP, and I have to pitch in here. This comment is a bit unhinged, basically claiming that every WIP GUI library written in Rust sucks on principle. This is false, and there are some very good ongoing efforts that will probably be great and desirable GUI options in the future.
Also, the comment claims that QML is not Qt. QML was added to Qt in 2009 and has been where a large proportion of the developer's focus has been ever since. It is absolutely Qt and you can't claim otherwise.
A bit of a passionate response to a passionate parent comment.
Dreadful may be your opinion, but there is actually much more approval than disapproval for Slint in that huge overview.
Why does the link try to download a copy of fart from Wikipedia?
View source: https://www.boringcactus.com/assets/site.js
Another hackernews hater checking the http referrer I'd guess
What about gpui? The Zed teams GUI framework?
Edit: Oh, my bad. I thought they open sourced it separate from Zed. Looks like they are still tied together.
But they did open source it separately? https://www.gpui.rs/
How are they tied?
Fascinating.
I am seeing that you are writing a matrix client UI basically which is nice but I am interested if its possible that you could write it in (agnostic?) UI way if if it makes sense, where I can swap out any other protocol instead of matrix too
I was just interested in something similar once and there are other protocols like session,simplex,signal etc. too which I feel like can definitely benefit from an unified UI perhaps
Personally I am always interested if any messaging app should just create a cli application/api and have someone else create the UI since I feel like the UI bugs and similar can definitely be fixed if its not in house.
I am curious of your opinion regarding it but the project looks cool!
Personally although I can enjoy telegram's UI, nothing beats cinny's UI ever.
Cinny has the best UI of any messaging app I have ever seen personally, there are only very few things I wish to change in that, which can be changed via userstyle and even recent modern element feels good to me personally but cinny is brilliant overall
So I am interested to hear what your thoughts are on cinny too (cinny.in)
I needed a simple chat UI for a diy "SMS gateway" (for an extra [nearly free] phone number used only to receive SMS - mainly for registrations and deliveries) and I ended up using Delta Chat that uses your email server under the hood. So I implemented all the logic based on emails... but it would be much better to have some nice looking UI with easy integration.
Basically pidgin but with telegram's UI.
Oh yes! I had heard of pidgin but only had people use it for IRC/XMPP but I didnt know it was an universal chat client.
Yes you are absolutely correct, basically pidgin but with telegram's UI (or cinny's UI can be good too) but yea, thanks for pointing out to the resource again! I didnt know it was universal chat client, thanks for helping me know that.
You could just use libpurple to do all the im stuff and literally just write a user interface. That said, purple 2 isn't really designed for modern chat networks, but we're trying to solve that with the still unreleased purple3.
You may be interested in our State of the Birds which cover libpurple and pidgin development. https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird
That's great work. Thanks for sharing. I was wondering is there a good way of mixing rust and Qt but I decided that this wouldn't make sense... But I'm used to generate C++ code from uic, and have little experience in qml.
Hey, I'm the author of the post. Thanks for reading! Appreciate it :)
I think QML is very easy to get started with and you should just give it a go. It's not without its weirdness as other comments have already mentioned, and unfortunately there's still many controls that are less-than-ideal for desktop applications than their original QWidget equivalents. Using QWidgets+UIC is nice, but in my experience creates problems when you want to get fancy and custom with your design, with animations and shifting layouts and whatnot, well, especially after using QML.
> found out that VS Code was running cargo check one way while in the terminal cargo check was doing some other thing, and effectively blowing the cache every time I switched from one to the other
I have a similar problem with JetBrains RustRover. For example when I do cargo build and cargo clippy in the terminal after RustRover has done build it seems to start over rebuilding more things than when I edit something in vim and only use cargo from the terminal.
Yeah I found the same thing. The issue turned out to be that something in my `.bashrc` was appending to `PATH` (or some other env var). Because my `cargo build` commands that were running in one more level of shell than Rust-analyzer, it had different env vars and therefore a different cache key.
Once you fix it so that Rust-analyzer sees the same env vars as your shell then the issue goes away. It's kind of annoyingly hard to debug though.
It would be great to create a torrent like protocol for chat. People would host for their own circle of friends with some central hosting option for non technicals.
I think a self-hosting option for IM that's better than XMPP could be nice... that said, not sure if something like torrent would be good. I gave a lot of thought to something similar for emails, and the biggest issue came down to, it would be difficult to do something anonymous, distributed, and resistant to flooding/poison pill attacks.
Torrents themselves work against this, because you have known hash values as part of seeding... with email and messaging, you wouldn't have one-off advanced knowledge, and if anyone can send anyone a message, you'd be open to a flood of messages from what seems to be randos. There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse.
A federated system that's otherwise tethered to a domain/email or similar would at least allow for self-management and/or block listing techniques to work better in practice.
> There's some of this from scammers on Telegram and other social media, but it would be much worse
I get about one scam message per week on Telegram. And the annoying thing with Telegram is that it’s a paid feature to be able to make it so that only your contacts can send you messages.
Additionally, in order to block and report the sender, I first have to open the message, which sends a read receipt to the sender. Which in turn, if the scammers are smart, is something that they make note of automatically.
So one can presume that every time I open a scam message to block and report the sender, as I do, I am also giving the scammers confirmation that this number is actively in use and my number will keep being included in lists of numbers that they and others send scam messages to.
So Matrix?
There were some rather forgotten nowadays projects like Tox, Briar, Ricochet that should fit what you describe
Thanks! I was not aware.
I think your emoji pop up thing looks better then Telegram's. There's has way too much animation with all the emoji bouncing around. Yours was nice and clean.
Haha thank you, I was quite pleased with the outcome. It's good, cause getting the animated emojis working would be pretty involved :P
Great work on the 20% of making a working chat app. Now somebody has to do the remaining 80% and then the other remaining 80%.
Thanks. It was just a fun exercise and I had fun writing about it.
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