A further privacy blunder is that Telegram notifies your contacts when you join it – unless you don’t give it permission to access your contacts. The app doesn’t warn you it’s about to ping your contacts, and that’s a big caveat for those who want to use Telegram to keep a low-profile.

Telegram lacks the Stories feature of some competing messaging apps which lets you post images or short videos without messaging a contact directly.

Possibly the biggest disadvantage Telegram has over more popular messages is simply that: popularity. Despite its hundreds of millions of fans, Telegram is still leagues behind WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat in active monthly users.

If you’re in the West and you meet a new contact, the odds are they’ll prefer using WhatsApp to Telegram messenger.Continue reading→