Telegram X

Telegram X is Telegram’s second official app for Android. It came out of a contest Telegram ran for Android developers, and Telegram introduced it in 2018 as an app “written from scratch, with an entirely new code base”, built on TDLib, Telegram’s library for writing clients. It works with your normal Telegram account, chats, channels and groups, and installs next to the regular Telegram app, which has a different package name. Releases come regularly; 0.29.1, build 1817, appeared on 11 October 2026.

The version numbers count time rather than features: the code derives “0.29.x” from a date in 1997, so the build number, 1817 here, is the real sequence.

Notifications

This build delivers notifications through Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging. On a phone without Google Play services, the settings show: “Google Play Services are unavailable. Please check you have them installed and up-to-date. Notifications may arrive with big delays or not arrive at all without them.” In that case the app relies on Android’s account sync, which it asks to run every 30 minutes, and which needs system auto-sync turned on; Android decides when the sync actually runs.

What goes online, and Google’s parts

Besides Telegram’s own servers, from the source of this version:

• Connection details sent to Telegram: the app’s package name, which app installed it, the fingerprint of its signing certificate, your time-zone offset and the build’s source commit, plus crash reports from its Telegram library and a flag for whether it runs on an emulator. We found no setting to turn these off.
• Google’s components, which are closed source: Firebase Cloud Messaging for notifications; Google Maps and Play location services for maps and sending your location, where sending a location needs the Google Maps app installed; Play Integrity, reCAPTCHA and SafetyNet, used only when Telegram’s server asks the app to verify itself, for example during login; ML Kit for scanning QR codes and for detecting a message’s language on the phone; and Google Play’s in-app updates. The Play Billing library is included but no code uses it in this version.
• Embedded videos in link previews play from their sites when you tap them; YouTube’s go through youtube-nocookie.com.
• The in-app updater, for copies not installed from an app store (see the questions below).

There is no Google Analytics or Crashlytics; the build explicitly leaves Analytics out, and our scan found no tracking libraries.

Emoji

Telegram X comes with emoji images in Apple’s style, without a licence statement in the project. In the settings you can download other sets instead: Google’s, JoyPixels, Twitter’s, Samsung’s, Microsoft’s, Blob and OpenMoji.

About this file

• This is the official GitHub release of 0.29.1.1817, Telegram-X-0.29.1.1817.apk, for Android 7.0 and later on ARM, 32- and 64-bit. Its SHA-256 matches the “universal” checksum in the release notes, and it is signed with the developers’ key, issued to Viacheslav Krylov. The project also lets you check an APK by sending its checksum to its bot, @tgx_bot.
• Telegram X’s releases also include builds for Android 4.1–4.4, 5.x and 6.0 only; we host the one for current phones.
• The 47.9 MB file declares 59 permissions: for calls, the camera and microphone, contacts, location including in the background, notifications, the account sync behind the notification fallback, and the updater. Sixteen of them are icon-badge permissions for various phone makers’ launchers.
• Telegram X is licensed under the GPL-3.0; the Google components listed above are not open source.
• The project’s only images are promotional mock-ups with fictional characters, so we don’t show screenshots.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones).

Recent releases on the project’s GitHub. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.