On my 2017 Xeon workstation and in Telegram, I can just press the Find shortcut, type a keyword and get results from back in 2015 in a manner of 1-2 seconds. It's amazing.

On my 6 year old mobile phone, I can do the same thing in Signal. Takes seconds to find arbitrary strings in years long very active conversations.

Honestly, I've no idea how we can accept bad performance in Teams and Slack. I can grep hundreds of megabytes of text in seconds on a raspberry pi. You have to actively try to make your software shitty to not be able to do that on a modern desktop.

I am with you but I don't think anybody deliberately makes software shitty per se. It's more like "not my damned problem" and everybody picks a framework or a library for basic stuff and piles them on top of one another.

Almost like software should actually work

Of course. That's what I was saying. It boggles my mind how something that basic is so hard in other apps.

I'm not quite sure I understand why you would need to scroll for 25 minutes to find an old message in WhatsApp when search is available.

My first guess would be because what you're looking for isn't tagged with unique keywords (maybe just a vague idea of a date), or because pulling up a single message may not pull in it's context "grep -A/B/C" style.

I needed evidence that 2 years ago I was in touch with that person - what was sent didnt matter, nor did i remember contents of the message at all.

If what's app was not crap you could search by date, but I had to scroll.

Ok that makes sense - I think the best solution in that case is to try to think of a word that you may have used around that time and search for that - then if you get the right year you can at least scroll from there.

Even so, I think WhatsApp's scroll is pretty fast especially compared to Teams. Teams only seems to be able to store 1 page worth of content in memory at any one time which makes scrolling for anything even an hour back excruciating.

You scroll whatsapp for a bit, and then it takes 30s to load messages. Telegram scroll is Instant, and trully endless, like a native app loading text should be

You'd think they would use the scroll bar like text editors do on huge documents. Just jump back to that point and keep +/- several screens rather than the entire freaking buffer. I wrote that for a basic text editor that I wrote for fun and it wasn't actually hard and would open gigabyte size documents almost instantly because I was only ever loading about a megabyte of info rather than the whole stinking file.