Unfortunately, I’ve encountered many of the same issues, so I would recommend trying either Session (fork of Signal) [1] or Telegram (less secure but supports bots) [2]
Telegram is not just “less secure”. It’s not secure, period. Messages are stored on the server in plaintext. That’s what makes it orders of magnitude easier for them to implement all those features (large groups, channels, bots, etc).
[1] https://getsession.org/ [2] https://telegram.org/