I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Just stop using the spyware ones?
Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they’ve already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with “the most backdoor looking bug” with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
Telegram’s backend is proprietary software and they (very similarly to Discord for example) can just decide to read your chats whenever they want. It’s even worse then WhatsApp in this sense (at least as long as you trust Facebook that they actually encrypt your chats, again, there is no way to know if it’s proprietary software).