The fact this review exists for
Telegram is marketed on security, is widely described as an encrypted messenger, and is not one by default.
Ordinary chats, every group and every channel are encrypted in transit between your device and Telegram’s servers. On the servers, Telegram holds them in a form it can read. That is not end-to-end encryption, it is the same arrangement Gmail has, and it means the company is a party to your conversations whether it wants to be or not.
End-to-end encryption exists in Telegram, in a mode called Secret Chats. Secret Chats work between exactly two people, must be started deliberately, do not appear on your other devices, and are not available in the desktop apps at all.
If you have never deliberately started a Secret Chat, none of your Telegram messages have ever been end-to-end encrypted. That sentence is true for the great majority of the platform’s users, and it is why Telegram appears in the avoid list on our encrypted messenger ranking rather than in the picks.
Why home-grown cryptography is a criticism
Telegram runs on MTProto, a protocol the company designed itself.
Cryptographers have objected to this since the beginning, and the objection is not that anyone has broken your messages. It is a structural argument about how cryptographic assurance is produced. Established constructions become trustworthy through years of public attack by people trying to break them, and the weaknesses found in that process get fixed before anyone deploys them at scale. A protocol built in-house and deployed immediately skips that process and carries whatever flaws remain undiscovered.
The comparison that makes this concrete is Signal, whose protocol was published, formally analysed by academics, licensed by competitors who had every commercial reason to find fault with it, and reviewed again independently. Our provider record lists two protocol reviews for Signal and none at all for Telegram, and the server code here is closed, so the analysis could not be independent even if someone attempted it.
Ownership, jurisdiction and the 2024 change
Telegram FZ-LLC operates from Dubai under a British Virgin Islands parent, Telegram Group Inc. That is an unusual structure for this market, and the United Arab Emirates sits outside the intelligence alliances we track on the ownership explorer.
In August 2024 the company’s founder was arrested in France over alleged failures to moderate criminal activity on the platform. Telegram subsequently changed its policy to hand user IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities on valid legal requests.
That change matters more here than it would elsewhere, because of the encryption position. When a company with no readable content receives a legal demand, the exposure is bounded by what it holds. When a company holding readable copies of ordinary chats changes its disclosure posture under legal pressure, the ceiling on what could be produced is considerably higher.
What it costs
Telegram is free to use. Premium is optional.
| Plan | Intro | Renewal | True cost per month over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Premium, 1 year | $59.88 | $59.88 | about $4.99 |
Premium is the only plan on record and it does not rise at renewal, which is more honest pricing than most of the VPN market manages. The funding question is the more interesting one. Telegram ran for years on bond issues rather than revenue, and since 2021 it has carried advertising in large public channels. Advertising and a business built on knowing which channels people read are in tension with the privacy positioning, and it is a tension the product has not resolved.
What it is genuinely good at
This is not a bad product. It is one of the best-built communication apps in existence.
Sync is instant across every device, with no phone acting as a hub. Group and channel features are far ahead of anything else here: enormous membership limits, granular admin controls, bots, and a publishing model that has made it the default distribution channel for entire communities and news operations. The clients are fast, polished and available on every platform including the browser.
Almost all of that is a direct consequence of the server holding your messages. Cloud sync of full history, search across everything from a new device, and desktop access without your phone are exactly the features that end-to-end encryption makes hard. Telegram made a product decision, and it is a defensible one. What is not defensible is presenting the result as an encrypted messenger.
The iPhone app
Our App Store analysis used a sample of 100 recent reviews from the German and Canadian storefronts, all from the last ninety days, against a listing rating of 4.01 stars from about 279,000 ratings.
The sample mean was 2.28 and recent sentiment was negative, which is the weakest reading among the messengers we collected. The dominant complaint theme was customer support at 11 per cent of the sample, followed by crashes at 5 per cent, billing and auto-renew at 4 per cent and privacy concerns at 4 per cent. A sample of 100 is small and self-selecting toward complaint, so treat the direction as informative and the absolute number as noise.
Where it lands
Use Telegram for what it is good at, which is public and semi-public communication at scale, and stop treating it as a confidentiality tool. If a conversation would be a problem in the hands of a company that can read it and has agreed to answer legal requests, that conversation does not belong here.
The frustrating part is that Telegram could have shipped end-to-end encryption by default, kept most of the app quality, and been an easy recommendation. It chose not to, repeatedly, and its users have been left believing otherwise.
What we have not tested
We have not run our own cryptographic analysis of MTProto, and we could not audit the server code because it is closed. We have not independently verified the 2024 policy change against Telegram’s own primary announcement, which our provider record flags as the next verification step. Nothing in this review is a measurement we made ourselves.