Many in the crypto and privacy community mistakenly trust Telegram because it’s “end to end encrypted”, but there are huge issues including not hiding the metadata, censorship, centralization, and phone numbers.
Send this video to your friend that asks why you won’t join:
https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/why-telegram-sucks/
I used to be a big proponent of Signal.
It was incredibly easy to have friends and family download the app and replace their SMS app with it.
Almost zero change or learning curve on their end, and we all got increased security when we used it.
Telling your parents to download yet another new app to talk to just you is a no-go and sabotaged their goal of increasing security for people at large.
SMS is INCREDIBLY insecure, and it doesn’t surprise me that they dropped it. It risks giving a false sense of security to anybody who doesn’t understand encryption (like, you know, your parents). They’ll think that any conversation in Signal is secure when most of them probably aren’t.
Signal isn’t “yet another new app”, it has been around for a decade and it continues to be the gold standard for E2E encrypted messaging. The fact that SMS still exists and people are stupid enough to use it does not mean Signal needs to maintain a feature that made their product inferior.