‎Telegram Messenger App

Any Telegram content is synced between the user’s logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, traffic doubled in five months with 2 billion daily messages. Telegram offers end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls, and optionally in private chats if both participants use a mobile device.

The company says this is done “to protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption”. It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests. As of March 2025,update Telegram has more than 1 billion monthly active users, with India as the country with the most users. The company’s founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app’s role in fighting censorship in Russia. All issues were patched before the paper’s publication with a security bounty paid out to the researchers.

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Reactions can be used to respond to a message with emoji, with Premium users having access to more reaction choices and the ability to leave more reactions per message. As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a “cloud draft” that syncs with others, so typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example. Chats can be exported to preserve them via Telegram’s Desktop client, although the saved data cannot be imported back into the user’s account. Upon signing up, messages sent and received by the user are tied to their number and a custom username, not the device. To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform.

Telegram’s CEO then said that the requested data was technologically impossible to obtain. On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended in Brazil and fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform. In France, initial investigations of a terrorist act revealed the perpetrators used Telegram to communicate, though follow-up research suggested that the extent of the app’s use was “unclear”. ISIS has used Telegram for recruiting attempts with some cells recommending the app to their followers. Moldovan president Maia Sandu denounced that Telegram refused any collaboration with the Moldovan state authorities against illegal activities taking place in its platform such as vote buying.

In April 2022, bots gained support for customized interfaces and inline page loading. It features a website widget that can be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. These platforms also enable businesses to add Telegram chat widget to their websites and gives them the option to automate conversations or let human agents reply. In April 2021, the Payments 2.0 upgrade enabled bot payments within any chat, using third-party services such as Sberbank, Tranzoo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY to process the credit card information. To activate an inline bot, a user must type the bot’s username and a query in the message field. The Dutch website Tweakers reported that an invited bot can potentially read all group messages, when the bot controller changes the access settings silently at a later point in time.

In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages. Telegram also has social networking features, allowing users to post stories, create large public groups with up to 200,000 members, or share one-way updates to unlimited audiences in so-called channels. It allows users to exchange messages, share media and files, and hold private and group voice or video calls as well as public livestreams. It supports rich group chats with up to 200,000 members, custom folders, bots, and even self-destructing messages for privacy. The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine enforced the restrictions following evidence reported to them by Kyrylo Budanov, showing Russia’s ability to access messages and user data on the platform. They criticized how, unless modified first, the default general security model stores all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers continuously; and that it does not enable end-to-end encryption for messages by default.

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Forwarded messages also maintain reply formatting, able to show which messages in a thread are replying to others. Users can schedule messages to send at a particular time or when their conversation partner comes online, as well as choose to send a message “without sound” without a notification. Some stickers feature full-screen effects that play out when first sent or when tapped. By default, any account that is inactive for 6 months is automatically deleted, though the period can be shortened or extended up to 18 months through the Settings menu. In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk. Users can use Telegram’s transparency bot to check how many legal requests from their country it has processed.

According to press reports, prior to the bonds placement, Durov had rejected an investment offer for a 5–10% stake in the company as well as several undisclosed ones, valuing the company in a $30–40 billion range. A day later, the Mubadala Investment Company stated that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund participated in its deal undisclosed through the Russia-UAE joint investment platform to buy convertible bonds. The funding was required to cover the debts amounting to $625.7 million, including $433 million to investors who bought futures for Gram tokens in 2018 and included purchasers such as David Yakobashvili. On 15 March 2021, Telegram conducted a five-year public bonds placement worth $1 billion.

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Beginning in December 2016, Telegram began publishing daily moderation statistics regarding terror-related content in an official channel named @ISISwatch. In September 2024, Telegram announced that it would begin to hand over users’ IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities who have search warrants or other valid legal requests. Such content is usually linked to Telegram allowing misinformation on the platform as, according to Pavel Durov, “conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators”. In 2017, in an attempt to monetize Telegram without advertising, the company began the development of a blockchain platform dubbed either “The Open Network” or “Telegram Open Network” (TON) and its native cryptocurrency “Gram”. According to him, these features will require more bandwidth and the added cost will be covered by the feature prices, in addition to covering some of the costs incurred by regular users. After the shutdown of the TON project, the company needed to repay the investors the money that was not spent on its development during 2018 and the beginning of 2019, while the project was active.

Groups and channels also support polls, which can be open or anonymous and can support multiple choices.
They support flexible admin rights and can use bots for moderation to prevent spam and unwanted activity.
Specific limited-edition gifts can be upgraded to a collectible version, unlocking a random appearance and other attributes.
In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device.
In September 2021, Telegram added interactive emoji, a type of animated emoji which also play a fullscreen effect in the chat.

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In June 2015, Telegram launched a platform for third-party developers to create bots. The interface shows users a visual representation of their storage usage and also lets them sort their cached media by size to clear specific items. Auto download settings can also be applied based on chat type such as group, channel or private. Telegram clients can turn off media autoplay and automatic downloads for both WiFi and mobile data, adjusting them for media type and size.

Telegram comes with one default sticker pack, and users can install additional sticker packs provided by third-party contributors. Telegram introduced affiliate programs in December 2024 that allow developers to create an affiliate program for their bot or mini app. Interfaces can be adjusted to match the app’s theme even if it changes while interacting with the bot.

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Telegram’s default chat function missed points because the communications were not encrypted with keys the provider did not have access to, users could not verify contacts’ identities, and past messages were not secure if the encryption keys were stolen. The order came following a complaint from media organizations —Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus+— saying the app allowed users to share copyrighted content without their consent. Telegram’s internal reporting system has an option to report content that contains child abuse, including specific messages in groups and channels.

Both in Secret and regular chats, messages can self-destruct after they are read, disappearing for all parties after a period set by the user, ranging from 1 day to 1 year.
It supports rich group chats with up to 200,000 members, custom folders, bots, and even self-destructing messages for privacy.
The bug was fixed on the day of the publication with a $100,000 payout to the author and a statement on Telegram’s official blog.
Reactions are always on in private chats and can be enabled by admins in groups and channels with the ability to allow or exclude specific reactions.
Telegram has public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram’s official apps to build their own instant messaging applications.

They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to https://chickenroadapp.in/ the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum. In March 2014, Telegram promised that “all code will be released eventually”, including all the various client applications (Android, iOS, desktop, etc.) and the server-side code.

Following the launch of Stars, Telegram released several updates to their functionality, such as allowing Stars to be used to unlock media in channels or to buy gifts for other users. Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19. Premium users have access to extra stickers, emoji, reactions, and customization features like a special badge and the ability to change the look of their messages in chats. The optional paid subscription gives users increased limits in the app, such as larger file uploads, faster download speeds, unlimited voice message transcription, as well as numerous other increases such as the number of pinned chats and folders. While any user can upload custom emoji to the platform, the use of custom emoji in chats is only available to users with Telegram Premium. In October 2024, Telegram added increased messaging limits for bots, allowing bots to send up to 1000 messages per second to their users.

The company was initially supported by founding CEO Pavel Durov’s personal funds after the sale of his stake in VK. In addition, Telegram offers functions for making payments directly within the platform, alongside an external service such as Stripe. In February 2015, creators of the unofficial WhatsApp+ client released the Telegram Plus app, later renamed to Plus Messenger, after their original project got a cease-and-desist order from WhatsApp.

Android version based on TDLib.The iOS version was discontinued, with its code merged with the main Telegram app. It is automatically updated and will most likely get new versions faster than the apps in the Play Store and App Store. This enables the building of clients for non-traditional platforms like KaiOS (supported by Telekram), or S30+/Mocor Feature phones (still in development). The built-in media viewer supports common media formats – JPEG, PNG, WebP for images and H.264 and HEVC in videos in MP4 container and MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, Opus and AAC for audio. Telegram has various client apps, some developed by Telegram Messenger LLP and some by the community.

This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version. In December 2020, a study titled “Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0” was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol. The editorial staff was made aware of the advertisement by a Telegram user and the online magazine Übermedien. This is seen as an issue for non-profit organizations and similar entities who want to operate a Telegram channel. As of August 2025, there was no option for channel owners to opt out of this mechanism.