DrKLO
Telegram
Java2013–2026
DrKLO / Telegram
Telegram
Telegram for Android source
43Distinct people
52Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
30.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Telegram for Android source
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
>Loading your messages on Signal can take quite a while. Yeah if you have to go through hundreds of ratchet steps, yeah it will take time. That's expected. The only way to make…
maqp used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- telegramdesktop/tdesktop · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- telegram-foss-team/telegram-foss · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- telegrammessenger/telegram-ios · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year52 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-12-16 13:13:10 UTC to 2026-02-11 13:41:06 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Telegram messenger for Android
Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free.
This repo contains the official source code for Telegram App for Android.
Creating your Telegram Application
We welcome all developers to use our API and source code to create applications on our platform.
There are several things we require from all developers for the moment.
Obtain your own api_id for your application.
Please do not use the name Telegram for your app — or make sure your users understand that it is unofficial.
Kindly do not use our standard logo (white paper plane in a blue circle) as your app's logo.
Please study our security guidelines and take good care of your users' data and privacy.
Please remember to publish your code too in order to comply with the licences.
API, Protocol documentation
Telegram API manuals: https://core.telegram.org/api
MTproto protocol manuals: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto
Compilation Guide
Note: In order to support reproducible builds, this repo contains dummy release.keystore, google-services.json and filled variables inside BuildVars.java. Before publishing your own APKs please make sure to replace all these files with your own.
You will require Android Studio 2025.1.4, Android NDK 27.2.12479018 and Android SDK 36.
Clone the Telegram source code with its submodules:
git clone --recursive --shallow-submodules https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram.git Telegram
In case you forgot the --recursive flag, change to the Telegram directory and run:
git submodule init && git submodule update --init --recursive --depth=1
Copy your release.keystore into TMessagesProj/config
Fill out RELEASE_KEY_PASSWORD, RELEASE_KEY_ALIAS, RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD in gradle.properties to access your release.keystore
Go to https://console.firebase.google.com/, create two android apps with application IDs org.telegram.messenger and org.telegram.messenger.beta, turn on firebase messaging and download google-services.json, which should be copied to the same folder as TMessagesProj.
Open the project in the Studio (note that it should be opened, NOT imported).
Fill out values in TMessagesProj/src/main/java/org/telegram/messenger/BuildVars.java – there’s a link for each of the variables showing where and which data to obtain.
You are ready to compile Telegram.
Localization
We moved all translations to https://translations.telegram.org/en/android/. Please use it.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
3 sourcesTelegram for Android Activity Chat Source Code
2 points · Open discussion"Compared to Telegram (which is also privacy-focused and NOT owned by Facebook like WhatsApp is) that simply works, I'm not sure what Signal brings to the mainstream table."
Firstly, with Telegram asynchronous chats are trivial to make, because all you're doing is managing data the server has using multiple clients. The moment you add E2EE for multiple clients, that's when things get hard, like really, really hard. Try enabling secret chats for desktop client with Telegram and you'll see how convenient Telegram is. See the thing is, Telegram doesn't even have cross-client E2EE. None of the official desktop clients support E2EE, and the 3rd party client that do, are not interoperable with other clients. You don't see the messages on multiple devices.
Telegram is snappier because the team is cheating with the star topology architecture. The
Read the rest
re's no way to have forward secret, future secret group chats with shared encryption key. There's three choices.
1. No E2EE for groups at all (The Telegram way \o/)
2. E2EE with static group chat key (no forward/future secrecy)
3. Individual encryption of messages to each peer (has both forward and future secrecy) -- the way Signal does it.
So to answer your question "I'm not sure what Signal brings to the mainstream table." Signal brings actual Privacy by Design that Telegram developers have been unable to implement at any point.
"0 POC exploits have ever been released."
That's not what security is about. It's not the researchers with capability to break the encryption, it's the intelligence agencies, and they're not very eager to share.
"They are now recognized as IND-CCA secure"
They sure are. I'm going to be honest with you. I think MTProto end-to-end encryption is fine. It might be even great. You have the fingerprints, you can check there's no MITM. Great. But there's a tiny problem:
1. This great E2EE protocol isn't enabled by default (unlike with Signal)
2. This great E2EE protocol isn't available for group chats on any client (unlike with Signal where all clients support it)
3. This great E2EE protocol isn't available for desktop clients (unlike with Signal)
"To be mainstream, you have to have mainstream usability. Signal does not (at least not right now)."
You might be right in that Telegram is more usable, now. But Signal is catching up and fast, and once the gap closes, every feature will also be an actual feature (one that works privately as opposed to one that has privacy tradeoff of private content having to be shared with the server). At that point Telegram has to implement everything from the ground up.
Also, as for what the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia does with the tens of billions of plaintext messages stored on their server, I have no idea. All I know is that's a really, really, really tempting target for nation state hackers. And I have serious concerns about whether Telegram team would admit their messages were compromised, given that they can't mitigate and promise it'll never happen again by deploying app-wide E2EE: if they had the know-how they'd already done it.
Given that majority of Fortune 500 companies have been hacked, what are the chances Pavel Durov and his team (who lack the capability to implement basic E2EE) have magically hardened their servers against NSA, GCHQ, the Israeli Unit 8200, the Chinese intelligence, the Russian intelligence. Don't make me laugh.
One more thing, AFAIK there's no audit of Telegram's code base, and it's some of the smelliest code I've ever seen: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/master/TMessagesProj/... Look at that file size, the lack of comments, the amount of nesting, the shitty variable naming policy. It's an absolute shitshow. I have _nothing_ good to say about it.
And someone's always posting the Durov's "Why Telegram isn't E2EE by default" propaganda flyer, so here's a refutal before anyone decides it's time to post it again https://telegra.ph/Why-you-should-stop-reading-Durovs-blog-p...