There are plenty of popular messengers available for Android, and it's a tough market considering the fact that people prefer to use one or two of them for their daily communication. WhatsApp is considered to be the leader in this category, but there are plenty of alternatives.
Telegram is an established player in the market, having been around for over a decade and reaching 1 billion users. For reference, WhatsApp boasts over 3.3 billion users and Viber (most popular in Eastern and Southeast Europe) has more than 1 billion users.
A pure messaging experience
Telegram manages to offer a pure instant messaging app without much glamour on the side, but it definitely behaves faster than many heavyweight competitors. Its design resembles WhatsApp and Viber, but other than that there is not much to say about it.Massive groups and file sharing
There are some things it offers which have delighted us. You can easily send media and files regardless of their type, with massive size limits of up to 2GB per file, meaning you can easily share larger files which other messaging apps might reject.
Also, group chats can hold up to 200,000 members, meaning it may be perfect for projects which require many people sharing large files (like an IT project). You can also edit the messages you've sent, have the messages self-destruct, control if the photos are stored on your device, etc.Security takes an extra step
It can boast about its encryption as well, as it uses a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange. However, messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default, and you will have to create a New Secret Chat in order to force this level of security. This is not that great, as people don't want to think about it too much.
