Supporting tablets would allow us to chat and send files across devices, without resorting to apps like Messenger.
(Yes, I think this is correct: For anyone who are currently on WhatsApp or anything Facebook for that matter even Telegram is a huge improvement in most ways.)
This is also true with Whatsapp[2], but against their terms of service, so you risk getting banned, and built on reverse-engineering, plus you need an android VM of some sort.
I've been personally moving my family to Signal, since that provides the best UX and easier transition from Whatsapp. Once I'm comfortable enough with it, we'll likely transition to matrix.
What Matrix is missing is in my view:
- Client with simple UI, polished UX, and not just a smoking pot of features: FluffyChat[3] is mostly there.
- Server of which I can guarantee the uptime. Dendrite should lower the resource usage for a ~5-100 accounts server, and decentralised identities[4] would allow falling back to another server (such as a friend's).
We're mostly there, so I'm starting to prepare the switch, starting with my more technical friends, by setting a bridge up. Hopefully we can finally break that dependency on phone numbers (ideally, domain names as well with [4]) and move on to bey-based IDs.
[1] https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-signal
[1] Older bridge, unmaintained: https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-signal
[2]https://matrix.org/docs/guides/whatsapp-bridging-mautrix-wha...
[3] https://web.fluffychat.im/en/
[4] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...
then there is the problem with push-notifications passing throu either google or apple as well as device-backups which both hand over your metadata and probably message content.
imo telegram is in a better spot simply because it is not affilliated with the facebook/google ecosystem but in the end it does not make much of a difference due to aforementioned systematic deficiencies.
imo good reasons to cash in on the platform compatibility and convenience of telegrams cloud-messaging architecture.
> I thought basically no one used android tablets anyway
Tens of millions of Android tablets are sold every quarter.