As far as I know, it would still be needed at registration, just would give you an option to hide it and thus it would stop being your main identifier.
I know Signal is technically better but Telegram provides a much better user experience than Signal or WhatsApp and is also less problematic than WhatsApp.
My understanding is that Telegram is partnered with a non profit crypto group, and that group is partnered with like 20 different companies that validate transactions, one of which is Tencent.
Granted I only read a couple articles on it in the last five minutes cause this was the first I heard of it, there could be more to the story I missed.
Telegram is a decent middle ground. UI/UX matters, I'm not sure how the folks at Signal are completely missing that point.
The Signal UI is OK, as a competitor to SMS. But it's terrible compared to Telegram. This matters to non-technical people, it's how you get them to use it. Plus the seamless connection between devices - that's crucial. I can chat using whatever device is in front of me.
I'm not OP, but I've switched to Telegram a while back because I loved the silent message option. Scheduled are also awesome, and recently added quote part of reply is very neat.
This is all UX, the UI is sleek but nothing too extraordinary for me.
Telegram has some clumsiness in it's UX too, which I find annoying (attaching a pic on Android, for example).
I'm usually pretty indifferent to UI so long as UX makes sense. But even I feel the difference between Signal and Telegram, so much so that I have friends on both and we use Telegram instead of Signal.
That to me is pretty telling - we know better, we promote Signal to other people, and would still rather use Telegram because of UI/UX.
While Signal looks like any generic SMS app. Heck, both NextSMS and Textra look as good/better and have more "features" (interface customization).
As a technical person who cares more about functionality that stuff doesn't matter much to me, but it's easy to see how a typical user would perceive them (and honestly, the difference is so great it even affects me).
Signal looks dated, like SMS, Telegram looks (and behaves) modern.
You need to explicate the hell out of this cuz I vehemently disagree and point out, in terms of user experience its dogshit for me (but also implicitly that Telegram is conveniently insecure by default and even if you "encrypt", ifs a non-documented public slop version of messaging encryption [novel + security by obscurity]
Consequently, I would never be comfortable trusting it
What do you want expectorated, why IMO Telegram is less problematic than WhatsApp or why the UI is way better than Telegram or Signal? Cause they're very different things.