Choosing Your Chat App
Oct 24, 2025
Talking a bit about different chat apps and the techonologies they use. With so many options, understanding which is the best for your privacy and experience is important.
Hi folks! Meta is doing a lot of unnecessary things with Whatsapp. Most of us want a simple chat app with features just enough to make a good chatting experience. We don’t want Meta AI, or public channels in Whatsapp. But these money mads don’t care. Also recently Arattai (if I could spell it right) created a lot of hype, but let’s ignore it because it’s not end-to-end encrypted.
So what’s this post about? I will talk about different chat apps that we can consider. And importantly, the different kinds of chat apps out there based on the techonology they use. For the rest of the article, I will use e2ee for “end-to-end encryption”.
Types
Chat apps can roughly be classified into two types: cloud messengers and well non-cloud messengers.
Cloud Messengers: These are apps that store your messages in the cloud i.e., their servers. The most popular example is Telegram.
Non-Cloud Messengers: These are apps that only use their servers to transport your messages. They do not store your messages in their cloud or only store them for a very brief amount of time for transporting to the receiver correctlly (cases where the receiver could be offline at the time of sending). An example is- the very well known Whatsapp.
So what’s the difference?
One of the most important differences from the user’s pov is how you take care of the chat storage. With Telegram and the likes, you don’t have to worry about losing your chats when you delete the app, or change your device, because everything is stored on their servers. With Whatsapp, you lose your chats if you reinstall the app or change your device as the chats are directly stored on your device itself.
So isn’t cloud-based messaging just better?
No. There are important tradeoffs to consider. Let me start with stating a major fact: Telegram chats are not secured by e2ee by default. That means, if the people at Telegram want, they could read your chats. Yes, you read it right. And if you enable e2ee (through a feature called secret chats), you end up losing cloud features.
Yes, you have to choose- e2ee or free cloud storage. If your concern is privacy, don’t use cloud messengers that lack e2ee features. Then? Use Whatsapp? Didn’t I start by mentioning how Whatsapp is turning ass? Yes. And here I introduce- Signal. It’s an open-source chat app that works exactly like Whatsapp but can be trusted much much more. And it doesn’t have unnecessary AI or channel features. Also, Whatsapp uses the Signal Protocol, a protocol developed by the engineers at Signal that is now the industry leading techonology for e2ee.
That’s it. Thanks for reading and caring about your privacy. Cya!