The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Description: Telegram is like SMS, but more powerful. You can send messages, photos, videos and documents to people who are in your phone contacts (and have Telegram). You can also create groups for up to 200 people.

It's open source, secure and comes with an API that I have been told is fairly simple to utilise.

Link: https://telegram.org/

Being OSS, Telegram can even be sideloaded in an alternative build without the non-free components -- for info, have a look at https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/...

So, bye, bye, Whatsapp and Viber...

Thanks for posting this, Guinness.

I am Baas wrote:Thanks for posting this, Guinness.

No problems. There are still a few issues with connection loss being intermittent, but I can't complain as it's free.

Telegram - for messaging (like Skype).

Homesite: https://telegram.org
Download portable version: https://tdesktop.com/win/portable
(there are versions for Android, iPhone/iPad, WinPhone, PC/Mac/Linux, also web-version).

@Softpedia: http://softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-SOFTW ... ktop.shtml
Interesting post: http://new.office-watch.com/2015/safely ... aging-apps

Mea culpa.

Nh wrote:Mea culpa.

It's cool. When guiness posted initially, it went into the Resources subforum probably because it was just inside a web-only tool back then.

Some very interesting stuff packed into this.

Old thread update:

No massive new features here, but I was pleased to see an active, open project with fairly regular updates:

http://www.softpedia.com/progChangelog/ ... 48423.html

Still seems portable!

Few additional notes from research over this last week:

• There is a 1.5 gig file send capacity. I haven't tested the speed but that's very impressive https://telegram.org/blog/shared-files
• It's not fully GPL'd:
  https://telegram.org/faq#q-why-not-open ... everything
• It's restricted (even on the web interface) to people who have a phone number they want to share. I found the inability to use any other form of authorization somewhat limiting.

webfork wrote:It's restricted (even on the web interface) to people who have a phone number they want to share. I found the inability to use any other form of authorization somewhat limiting.

That's one of the reasons why I have shied away from using Telegram. Even though they support a username system, they still require a phone number.

I agree that it would be preferable not to require a phone number; but with smartphones being the next frontier of computing the scramble is on for market share and Telegram is on that race, too, although it's not by far the biggest contender (see article below). Yet, at least it is still open source...

• https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/

• WhatsApp Vs Telegram: Should You Switch To Telegram?
  http://www.guidingtech.com/27347/whatsapp-vs-telegram/

• Mobile Messaging Clients Compared
  www.techspot.com /article/776-messaging-clients-compared/

I would recommend checking out EFF's Secure Messenging rundown:
https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard

freakazoid wrote:I would recommend checking out EFF's Secure Messenging rundown:
https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard

Thanks for the pointer, freakzoid, it was not on my radar...

Judging only from it, one is glad to find Telegram among the best -- amidst ChatSecure/Orbot, CryptoCat, Pidgin, Signal/RedPhone, Silent Phone/Text, and TextSecure.