Telegram: Moving Chat History from Other Apps

https://telegram.org/blog/move-history?ln=r

by proxysna • 5 years ago

11 11 5 years ago

telegram.org

Normille2• 5 years ago

Pity it doesn't work for importing chat history from Wire...

...But then again, Wire is so useless, it can't even import its own chat history, most of the time.

olah_12• 5 years ago

It's really upsetting how Wire was managed honestly. The bones were great (even built with Rust), but it really seemed like it just stalled out and then switched to being a Corporate app instead of a Consumer app in a last ditch effort to be sustainable.

Wire might still be around, not sure, but I could read the writing on the wall. I got out when "mentions only notifications" was deemed a "pro" feature and not table stakes.

Normille2• 5 years ago

Agreed. Wire had such great potential, being E2E encrypted, cross platform and based in Switzerland. I discovered it probably 4 or 5 years ago when looking for a cross-platform alternative to iMessages, after buying my 1st Android phone. It had a lot going for it back then and I moved all my family group onto it.

Unfortunately, during the intervening time, development seems to have all but stalled, with Signal, Telegram, et al overtaking Wire.

This would be bad enough on its own but was combined with an almost Steve Jobs-ian arrogance from the dev team. Their Github issues was full of requests, many dating back years, asking for really basic functionality like; font size control, support for landscape orientation, support for tablets, backup facility, etc. Most of which got a dismissive "We're not going to do that" response.

Then, when they belatedly did roll out a backup & restore function, it was barely functional and, even when it did occasionally work, could only restore on the same device it had been backed up from.

They "Coulda bin a contender" but, even with all the press coverage on alternatives to WhasApp over the past weeks, I've not seen a single mention of Wire. What a squandered opportunity!

[Incidentally. I moved all my family group over to Telegram, last year, after a Wire update lost people's messages archives, and the difference in usability and dare I say "fun" is like night and day. Even my 80-something year old mother, who's not the most tech savvy person in the world remarked how much better Telegram was]

core-questions• 5 years ago

I don't get why this is so important to people. I personally love Signal's disappearing messages feature - seldom would I ever want to scroll back through chat for anything.

If I did have some valuable chat history in an app, wouldn't I just want to save it out as a file I can keep somewhere?

Semaphor• 5 years ago

I often search through old chat messages to look up timestamps, certain links, what I said or someone else said. I don't use telegram or any of the mobile messengers, but the feature would be important to me.

stunt2• 5 years ago

Also when you know the app is not going to remove them, it's more likely to leave non-critical but still value able data in there. (someone's address, photos, a link that was shared with you etc)

cryo• 5 years ago

Does that mean that a friend using Telegram can import the history between her and me from WhatsApp even if I'm not using Telegram?

If yes this is just horrible, I don't want to have my data on Telegram servers without my permissions.

stunt2• 5 years ago

Well that all depends on how much your friend respects your privacy and sadly many of them don't do.

And by the way, that scenario is possible with any data that your friends have from you on any platform. They can technically copy your data from any source to other platforms.

If you share it, it isn't private anymore.

kitkat_new• 5 years ago

so e2e-encrypted chat is uploaded to Telegram without e2e-encryption? How nice...

0x49d1• 5 years ago

You choose what to import. Anyway: in case you turn on backup on let's say WhatsApp - it is uploaded to cloud storage and it's not encrypted too. So as a migration solution this one is great, but in case you need to stay it e2e - you just don't use this function.

Telegram: Moving Chat History from Other Apps

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