The Android Contest 2021 has started!

Prize fund: $60,000 for the first round.

Deadline: 23:59 on February, 14 (Dubai Time)

Task: Identify and fix imperfections in Telegram for Android – glitches, bugs, sloppy animations, instances of slow speed. Your work should result in meaningful and noticeable improvement from a user’s perspective.

This is a public reincarnation of our 2019 contest, now available for everyone.

Details: Download the source code of Telegram and fix the imperfections you identified. On the final day of the competition, compile your own version of Telegram and upload the APK to @ContestBot, together with a link to your fork’s pull request on GitHub and a description of improvements implemented.

The more imperfections / glitches / bugs you identify and fix, the higher the reward (provided the submitted code follows the same style as the existing code base). The gravity of fixed issues and the difficulty of eliminating them will be taken into account.

You may also improve existing functionality. A sample task of this type could include rewriting the camera module used in the attachment menu and for recording video messages using Camera 2 API or CameraX, while ensuring backward compatibility with Android 4.x.

You will have to proactively search for issues (potentially getting feedback from users/designers/testers or checking out Bugs and Suggestions) and find creative ways to fix imperfections without causing negative side effects to Telegram’s performance or usability.

Why users shouldn’t worry about ads on Telegram

I read an article that cautioned users from switching to Telegram from other apps, because "Telegram is going to introduce ads". This is misleading for at least 3 reasons:

1. There will be no ads in chats on Telegram. Users who rely on Telegram as a messaging app, not a social network, will never see ads. Private chats and group chats are and will always be ad-free. As I outlined in December, ads are being considered only in large one-to-many channels (like this one), which do not exist in any other messaging app. So users ditching older apps for Telegram won’t increase the number of ads in their lives.

2. User data will not be used to target ads. We believe that collecting private data from users to target ads the way WhatsApp-Facebook do is immoral. We like the approach of privacy-conscious services like DuckDuckGo: monetizing services without collecting information about users. So if we introduce ads in one-to-many-channels, they will be contextual – based on the topic of the channel, not targeted based on any user data.

3. We are fixing ads that are already here. In most markets, content creators on Telegram already monetize their content by selling promotional posts in their channels. This is a chaotic market with multiple third-party ad networks pushing intrusive ads that create a negative user experience. We want to fix this situation by offering a privacy-conscious alternative for channel owners.

Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts – as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them.

Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators – one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers. Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this.