Brian Acton is also on the Board of the Signal Foundation. He pumped a massive amount of money into the project after he left Facebook.
Of course not! Itâs a terrible design choice. If you want a direct IM app comparison, Telegram makes you choose your install location when launching the installer. And it also works on any browser through the website if you donât want to install it.
An app and a community all about privacy and user rights, and then itâs suddenly alright to be stripped of install location choice and storage management? The settings donât even let you choose where to save media and files received through chats, which is a VERY basic feature of any messaging app.
For comparison, Telegram reached 500 millions users this month. 1/4 of the users of the most popular IM app, by a non-commercial competitor, thatâs not too bad.
If Signal plays their cards right, they can be a major player. Currently, however, itâs been weighted and found wanting. It lacks features, choices, and a nice UI.
Weâll see 
To be honest, I didnât find Telegram any better (in terms of IM features) than the others (e.g. Element, Wire, Keybase, Viber, Skype, XMPPâŚ). And itâs for sure less secure than any of them, and probably less private than some of them. Yes, it has larger user-base than most of them, but thatâs it. Which is fine, but still not enough for me to use it as primary IM app. I mean, most of my contacts use WhatsApp, Viber, SkypeâŚand if Iâm quitting those only for privacy reasons, I will for sure look something better than Telegram when it comes to privacy
I didnât know that, I use/test Telegram portable 
Which doesnât have âSecret chatâ in its PC version, so it doesnât matter where the files are stored. TBH, I donât know how can someone even recommend desktop client without this option (even Skype has it)
On the other hand, if you use FDE, is it really that important to change location? I canât recall if any other messenger offered me to change install location during the process (Wire, Element, JamiâŚ)
Also, some people would claim that Web version of secure messenger can not be secure by design (not just IM, also storage, docs, etc.). IIRC, thatâs the reason why e.g. Signal doesnât offer web client (or Nextcloud its E2EE storage). And why some people recommend not to use web clients of other secure messengers. But Iâm not an expert, so I canât tell if this makes sense or not
Who told you Telegram is a non-commercial competitor? Still, yes, maybe things are going better for Telegram (but I donât see that as something so much better), but I was referring to Signal on my previous comment.
It depends on your threat model. From what we know, Signal doesnât collect and keep usersâ (meta)data, so itâs not so important where they are based. I mean, they said they would move outside of US if some âencryption breakingâ law passes. Also, as Iâm not living in USA, donât have any connections to USA and really donât care about USA, even if Signal shares my data with US government agencies, it wouldnât make any difference to me.
Iâm quitting FAANG services not cause they are giving my data to US government, but because they are giving/selling it to everybody else.
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I recently read that Signal uses Google and Cloudflare servers apart from Amazon AWS. Some guy also wrote that Signal got donations from a CIA spinoff. So should we still trust it?
Lately, Signal started to implement lots of WhatsApp features and Iâm wondering if the privacy suffers.
Itâs open-source, so you can check if privacy suffers with new features.
Tor is also funded by US government. Cause itâs useful to them also. Just like Linux kernel is funded by megacorps.
Most of other services use Google, AWS, MS, Cloudflare⌠serves. If you want to offer service that tens or hundreds of millions of people will use, those are your only options.