RE: Telegram: a new era of messaging
Telegram's crypto has been audited negatively. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure
Also the server source code is closed.
Signal, with the well-evaluated Axolotl protocol, is the preferred solution from those "phone number as your account" messaging apps. All open source, client and server. However, they still depend on Google's push infrastructure, and actively attacked the LibreSignal fork. https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37
The best solution for today however (if you don't mind creating an account on a server) is the XMPP + OMEMO protocol. An app that supports this is called Conversations.
This is until we have proper server-less p2p messengers (that are easy to use and don't drain battery power on mobile devices too much).
Yet this is rather old info from 2014 mostly. So far so good no one could access Telegram messages without access to you SMS on phone. But if one has 2FA (read in my post what it is) then stealing SMS messages would not work too.
That's not old news, nothing has changed since then, and your answer has nothing to do with the issues I've mentioned.
I agree, this issues might have place and there are apps that more secure. But as for usability-community-security compound Telegram has no competitor as for now. Do others have P2P bots for BTC|LTC|DOG|ETH exchange?
I use @BTC_CHANGE_BOT this one
Signal is just as usable, and encrypted chats will work seamlessly across devices (thanks to the mentioned Axolotl protocol), as opposed to Telegram.