Telegrand and Tok, Telegram clients
Many years ago, the way we communicated was very different. Sometimes you called on the phone, but it was also common to go to a friend's house to see if they were there and then decide what to do. Later, Nokia started its “Connecting people” marketing campaign, but for most that connection was limited to (expensive) SMS. Years later we all go through MSN, Skype and now, in countries like Spain and unfortunately, the king is WhatsApp. At least for personal use, because for communities there are alternatives, such as Discord or Telegram.
Compared to WhatsApp, Telegram is superior in everything, or almost everything, because it loses in number of users. But as an application, Telegram is immensely superior, starting because we can use it on any device, without limits, and ending with other things like the personal cloud of up to 1TB. In addition, it is open source and anyone can create a client for the platform, and that is something both GNOME and KDE are doing.
Telegram allows third parties to create their own apps
It's been a while since knew the existence de telegrand. When I read about it I thought that the official application works quite well and has everything, so I did not see much sense in it. But the thing changes if what we are looking for is that it is better integrated into the system and also used on mobile devices such as those that use Phosh. Telegram's desktop app is a bit slow on resource-limited ARM devices, and something built for them may be a better option.
Less time ago I have known the existence of Tok, the Telegram client that KDE is working on. I have to confess that I tried it for less than 5 minutes, partly because I thought the official version was much better, but reading articles like this June one rethinks things. Tok integrates seamlessly into Plasma, and it even has its own music player that supports the systray daemon. In the article we also see that it supports animated stickers, manages the sent files and the colors of the native theme well.
Are unofficial clients worth it?
Right now, Tok is available as a flatpak package at this link, and you have to install it manually, so it's not the best way to start with it. Telegrand, available here, is in the same situation, so we will have to be patient if we want to install and update them with an easier method. If they will be worth it or not I think it will depend on its developers, whether they add meat to the grill or not.
Although the truth is that at least Tok is lighter than Telegram in KDE, so it does seem like the best option if all the functions are not needed as soon as the official version implements them. The bots They work regardless of which client we use, so it's all about testing for the sake of integration and performance. In any case, having options is never a bad thing.