They want to do this because they want more traction for their blockchain: TRON, which, IIRC, is the payment method for ads, usernames and "stuff" inside Telegram.
However Du Rove is right about a bunch of things:
- Signal clients suck, specially the Desktop one where they ship (or used to) pre-built binaries like their own lib: https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc
- Also you can't have Signal without Google Play Store
- Signal client suck in usability. I wish I had Telegram client (android) and desktop (qt) instead of this electron garbage. Telegram clients are super-duper-awesome
- I would say that removing phone number requirement is their #1 request. yet they take so much time to address it, specially when they cry about phone number validation SMS costs
- BTW, telegram is implementing a very nice idea of a crowd sourced sms validation, where they use their users phone numbers to send the validation sms
- They have a very questionable crypto integration with MobileCoin, which have a obscure value: they depend on IntelSGX and is 95% pre-mined
However Du Rove is right about a bunch of things:
- Signal clients suck, specially the Desktop one where they ship (or used to) pre-built binaries like their own lib: https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc - Also you can't have Signal without Google Play Store - Signal client suck in usability. I wish I had Telegram client (android) and desktop (qt) instead of this electron garbage. Telegram clients are super-duper-awesome - I would say that removing phone number requirement is their #1 request. yet they take so much time to address it, specially when they cry about phone number validation SMS costs - BTW, telegram is implementing a very nice idea of a crowd sourced sms validation, where they use their users phone numbers to send the validation sms - They have a very questionable crypto integration with MobileCoin, which have a obscure value: they depend on IntelSGX and is 95% pre-mined