It's a good chat app overall. You just have to treat it like sms and assume there's no real privacy.

Also, they're very generous with file transfer size. It makes shifting things between people so much easier.

In other words, it's the features rather than the supposed privacy. If I want privacy, there's way better options, same for security. But those options suck with some of the more useful things at times.

Mind you, if they keep going with this shit, it'll be so bloated that it'll cease to be a good pick for the stuff I use it for, but there are actually plenty of users that are hyped about the shit whatsapp is doing, and the same goes for telegram.

It treats desktop clients as first-class citizens. That's a huge, huge advantage over Whatsapp, for me.

My colleague likes it and use it all the time. He doesn't really care about privacy and he often brings up cool features telegram has, like simple photo/video editor, shrink tool for media, newsfeed, etc. Which all seems quite polished and very usable. If only it wasn't such a mess in its core.