Telegram Desktop

Telegram is a popular messaging protocol with encryption and security as its key focus.

Fast and secure desktop app, perfectly synced with your mobile phone.

Scale to fit:

App ID:

telegramdesktop

automatic-app-scaling

Phone Compatibility:

3 of 5 Points, some parts are not phone optimized

It is a Qt based app, so it is not fully compatible to Phosh.

How to install:

APT:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install telegram-desktop
Flatpak:

Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.telegram.desktop

Command:

# You will need to trust and add flathub to flatpak
flatpak install flathub org.telegram.desktop

Website:

Repo:

Known issues

This app will draw its own titlebar by default, instead of relying on system-wide settings, causing the text input field to be fully masked by the on-screen keyboard

This can be changed by going into SettingsAdvanced and checking the Use system window frame box.

Tips and Tricks

Unfortunately, the Telegram desktop client by default does not run in the background, i.e. if you close the window, you are offline. However, telegram-desktop has a -startintray argument, which starts it hidden in the background, without spawning a window. If you do spawn a window afterwards e.g. via the menu icon and close it again, it also closes the background service. To prevent this, we can use the -startintray argument in a systemd service to always keep the service running (or more acurately keep spawning it), even if you close the window.

For this, create a systemd user directory with mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user. Then place following service file in ~/.config/systemd/user/telegram.service:

[Unit]
Description=Telegram in Background

[Service]
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/telegram-desktop -startintray

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Finally, enable the service. This will also spawn telegram in the background after rebooting the phone:

killall telegram-desktop # make sure telegram isn't currently running...
systemctl --user enable telegram.service # enable the service
systemctl --user start telegram.service # start telegram in background