What Telegram actually gives you once it is installed

Cloud chats

Your history is not tied to one device

Regular chats are stored server-side and encrypted in transit and at rest. Sign in on a new laptop and the same conversations appear, in order, with media still downloadable. Nothing has to be exported or backed up manually.

• Unlimited history with no local database to corrupt
• Search across all chats, including old media captions
• Sessions listed in settings so you can revoke a device remotely

Files and media

Send what email would reject

Documents, archives, audio and video go up to 2 GB per file and stay re-downloadable later. Files keep their original quality unless you deliberately send a photo as a compressed image.

• Drag and drop straight into a conversation on desktop
• Send as file to preserve the original resolution
• Saved Messages works as a personal cross-device clipboard

Organisation

Keep the noise out of the important list

Chat folders split work, family and channels into tabs. Pin the conversations you check hourly, mute a group until a date rather than forever, and archive the rest without deleting anything.

• Custom folders with include and exclude rules
• Per-chat notification sounds and mute schedules
• Unread counters that respect archived chats

Groups and channels

From a family thread to a public broadcast

Groups scale to 200,000 members with admin roles, slow mode and granular permissions. Channels are one-way broadcasts with view counts, suitable for announcements rather than conversation.

• Admin rights split per action, not all-or-nothing
• Topics keep large groups readable
• Public links and invite links with expiry

Privacy controls

Decide who can see what

Phone number visibility, last seen, profile photo and forwarded-message attribution can each be limited to contacts or nobody, with per-user exceptions. Two-step verification adds a password on top of the login code.

• Secret chats with end-to-end encryption and self-destruct timers
• Two-step verification with a recovery email
• Auto-delete timers for individual chats

Automation and extras

The parts people discover later

Bots handle reminders, translation, search and payments inside a chat. Stickers and custom emoji packs are user-made, and scheduled messages let you write now and send at a set time.

• Inline bots you can call from any chat
• Scheduled and silent messages
• Message editing with an edit marker instead of deletion