[imagesource: Getty]

I’m terribly upset that my Telegram crusade kicked off after the whole WhatsApp privacy debacle. The fact of the matter is, I was moving across regardless. Mainly because of the endless list of benefits Telegram has over WhatsApp, but also very much because of the Latent WhatsApp Anxiety (LWA) I was experiencing.

LWA will soon be a globally recognised medical condition that you yourself are more than likely suffering from. It’s linked to the biggest problem you face with WhatsApp, and something I have been appealing to my friends (those who haven’t seen the light) to consider, as I request they only contact me on Telegram.

You see, WhatsApp (and Signal, for that matter) is single-device based. In other words, if you lose or break your phone, there is absolutely no way to get to your WhatsApp chats. This is completely unacceptable in the year 2021.

Oh, but it’s ‘end-to-end encrypted’? Exactly why is everyone so obsessed with end-to-end encryption? Are you a spy? And then you go and back it all up in the cloud anyway 😆 do me a favour!

And if you do have WhatsApp backed up to the cloud (which you do – in iCloud or Google Drive), the security is then no different to Telegram, as it is no longer ‘end-to-end’ encrypted – which is marketing speak for ‘we are using old tech that stores the messages on the devices and we’re too far gone to do anything about it’.

Not that cloud security is poor – Telegram cloud messages are of course fully encrypted, and stored in a secure private cloud. Honestly, this messenger business really isn’t rocket science… it’s hard to understand why WhatsApp and the other players are so hopeless.

Back to your undiagnosed medical condition…

Remember, your phone is just a random device, to access your shit in the cloud. I store low-res versions of all my pics on my phone, then the hi-res pics are saved to the cloud. All my documents are in the cloud – notes, email, in the cloud. So if you’re insured properly with instant cash payments for repairs* (see note at the end about that), there really is nothing to panic about if your phone drowns, or gets squashed or lost or stolen. Those things really should be a non-event.

The main feature of Telegram is really that it’s not WhatsApp – so it’s cloud-based, not Facebook-owned, and it’s well written and beautifully designed.

WhatsApp is the single only reason you obsess over your phone and can’t let it out of your hands. Being chained to your phone because of one app beggars belief. As soon as you move to Telegram, all of that falls away. And, as per the condition – Latent WhatsApp Anxiety (LWA) – you only realise the hold it has had on you, once it’s gone. And let me tell you – it’s nothing short of euphoric.

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*It would be remiss of us not to mention that we only deal with official 2oceansvibe character, ‘The Insurance Guy’ (Richard Neville at Forsyth & Nash), when it comes to ALL insurance. They happen to also do device insurance properly – cash for phone repairs in your account within 24 hours. That kind of thing.