I find it amusing how, every year or so, we're served a fresh dose of FUD on Signal app, but nobody really talks about Telegram.
Discussion
I was worried about the project after Moxie left, but my concern abated over time.
Moxie is (or was, who knows how he's changed), by the way, a kind of leftist anarchist, the type I'd probably agree with one out of ten things on, the need for secure comms being one.
So a Board of Director government pawn who runs NPR and apparently failed freshman philosophy is not a concern to me. All that matters is the integrity of the app, which I currently presume -- by its open source status and by the audit of their encryption -- is not compromised.
Telegram is terrible in terms of privacy, signal is less worse, but still centralised. Simplex and xmpp are really decentralized and open protocols.
Simplex is going in the right direction, and may be a viable option one day. It’s never going to have the normie draw of the others, though.