Stickers are cloud-based, high-resolution images intended to provide more expressive emoji. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer’s specific website domain. Bots power Telegram’s gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages. When a user chooses to hide their profile photo, they can set an alternative „Public Profile Picture“ that will be shown instead. Hiding the status obfuscates the exact time the user was online and hides the statuses of other people respectively. In April 2025, Telegram launched secure group calls with end-to-end encryption by using blockchain-like encryption technology.
- In October 2024, Telegram launched Gifts, a type of virtual cosmetic item that users can purchase and send to each other in the app using Telegram Stars.
- Some use it in the form of a basic chat program; there are those who build communities, file sharing, or even bots.
- In July 2025, Telegram partnered with the rapper and media figure Snoop Dogg to release a set of limited edition collectible gifts alongside his music video „Gifts“.
- The company was initially supported by founding CEO Pavel Durov’s personal funds after the sale of his stake in VK.
- Channels are one-way feeds where the channel owner or admins can post content while followers can only read, react and comment, if comments have been enabled.
ChatGPT Atlas
In February 2018, Telegram launched their social login feature to its users, named Telegram Login. In July 2025, Telegram partnered with the rapper and media figure Snoop Dogg to release a set of limited edition collectible gifts alongside his music video „Gifts“. As of 2023, Telegram Premium can be acquired via in-app purchases facilitated by Apple and Google, directly via Telegram’s @PremiumBot, or with cryptocurrency on the Fragment platform.
User numbers
Telegram made substantial efforts to ban illegal content such as child abuse and pro-terrorist channels, including a partnership with Europol to eliminate IS presence on the platform, but communities of far-right extremist users are still on the app. Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified, but not individual user accounts. The same year, Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content. Users can import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line, and KakaoTalk due to data portability, making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one. Telegram content is synced between users‘ logged-in devices automatically through cloud storage, except for device-specific secret chats. Telegram’s FAQ page says it does not process requests related to illegal content in chats and group chats, and that „to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments“.
Using Your Phone Number
- The company only partially fulfilled a court request for personal data on two antisemitic Telegram groups, which authorities considered an intentional lack of cooperation.
- On 26 February 2014, the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest evaluated several data-protection aspects of Telegram, along with other popular instant-messaging clients.
- On 19 June 2022, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users.
- On 24 August 2024, Pavel Durov, who is both a French and UAE citizen, was arrested in France by French authorities.
- In January and February 2018, the company ran a private sale of futures contracts for Grams, raising around $1.7 billion.
- ISIS has used Telegram for recruiting attempts with some cells recommending the app to their followers.
Since 2017, Telegram users have been able to initiate one-on-one calls in private chats. Similarly, groups and channels can have content protection enabled, which prevents screenshots, forwarding and downloading of media. Premium users have the ability to set any chat folder as the default screen in the app while regular users will always see the full chat list when first opening the app.
Are there any major features missing from Telegram Web compared to the app?
On 12 June 2019, Telegram confirmed that it suffered a denial-of-service attack which disrupted normal app functionality for approximately one hour. The Telegram team tweeted that it was either because the user had malware or they were not using two-step verification. The hypothesis is that either mobile devices were hacked by SIM swap or the targets‘ computers were compromised.
Which Platforms Support Telegram?
A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.citation needed For encrypted chats (branded as Secret Chats), Telegram uses a custom-built symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. In October 2024, Telegram launched a verification platform, called Telegram Gateway, allowing third-party services to authenticate their users by sending verification codes via Telegram. In December 2020, Telegram launched a Bugs and Suggestions platform, where users can submit bug reports and suggestion cards for new features. The gateway sends users‘ Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users‘ phone number remains hidden. Telegraph natively supports Instant View, a feature which lets users read full articles in the chat with no load time and without opening an external browser.
Pavel Durov has said that Telegram users Kiekka Casino in „troubled countries“ should enable two-factor authentication by creating passwords in order to prevent this. Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. In April 2016, several Russian opposition members‘ accounts were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization.
Telegram also provides an open API for the creation of custom bots which can perform various tasks, integrate other services into Telegram chats, or work as mini apps or games. 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 one day to one year. Whether I was checking messages, accessing group chats, or managing multiple accounts, the experience was smooth and reliable. Even though this comes at the cost of convenience, Olvid has appealed to users wishing to have limited data exposure and stay out of centralized identity systems. Olvid does not have big channels, bots, or extensive social features but deals with small-group, private conversations. 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.