Telegram

Telegram is a cloud-based messenger with chats, groups, channels, voice and video calls and file sharing, synced across your devices. This page hosts the version Telegram offers for direct download on its website. In its words: “You can download Telegram for your Android device here. This version has fewer restrictions and receives automatic updates directly from telegram.org.” Telegram also names a channel, t.me/TAndroidAPK, as an official source of the same file.

How this version differs

• It is a separate app from the Google Play version, with its own package name, so it keeps its own data and doesn’t replace the Play app.
• It updates itself. About once a day by default, it asks Telegram’s servers whether there is a new version; Telegram’s servers can change how often. When there is one, a window offers to download it, and the file comes from Telegram’s own servers only after you tap.
• Premium is paid through Telegram, not Google Play billing.
• “Premium for SMS”, an opt-in program only in this version, lets Telegram send login codes from your phone in exchange for Premium, as described in the questions below. It is the reason this version asks for permission to send SMS and to read your phone state, number and call log.

Google components

The code is shared with the Play version, and so are Google’s libraries: Firebase Cloud Messaging for notifications, Google Maps and location services, Play Integrity, SafetyNet and reCAPTCHA, ML Kit, and the Play billing library. Telegram’s FAQ advises, for notification problems on Android: “Make sure Google Play Services are installed on your phone.” This build leaves out Firebase’s analytics core, and its crash reporting is switched off: those functions are empty in the code.

What goes online

• Telegram’s servers, for everything in the app, and the update check.
• Google’s push service for notifications.
• Link previews are made by Telegram, not by your phone: “Link previews will be generated on Telegram servers. We do not store data about the links you send.”
• Map images come from Telegram, Google or Yandex, whichever Telegram’s server configuration says. In secret chats, map previews are off by default.
• Inline bots are run by third parties. The app warns: “For the bot to work, the symbols you type after the bot’s username are sent to the respective developer.”

About this file

• This is the file telegram.org offers for download, byte for byte: version 13.1.1, for Android 6.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. Telegram publishes no checksum or certificate fingerprint for it. We record its signer, a certificate issued to Nikolay Kudashov of VK, and require the same one for every update; telegram.org gives no release date, so the date shown is the day we first downloaded this file. Telegram’s official APK channel lists the same 13.1.1 build. We found no stable-release change list on Telegram’s blog or the APK channel.
• Telegram’s GitHub source has now been updated to 13.1.1 (7237). We rechecked the behaviour described on this page against that source. The direct APK uses Telegram’s flavour-suffixed version code 72379 and has the same 74 permissions, Google libraries and signer as the preceding 13.1.0 file. Telegram describes its reproducible builds, which let anyone check that an APK matches the source, as something that “should be considered experimental”.
• The 70.9 MB file declares 74 permissions: contacts, the camera and microphone, location, including in the background, media and storage, notifications, calls through Android’s phone interface, the SMS and phone permissions described above, permission to install updates, Google’s push and billing services, and 17 for unread badges on various launchers.
• Telegram for Android is licensed under the GPL-2.0 or later; the Google components listed above are not open source.
• The screenshots are Telegram’s own promotional images from its Google Play listing; the Play version looks the same.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).