Telegram does not like secrets

and It's been 10 Years

First issue for secret chats on Telegram desktop github repo dates back to Jun 1, 2014. Despite being requested many, many times since then, Telegram development team refuses to work on adding secret chats to it's Telegram desktop client, Claiming It's hard and a lot of work and they won't even merge a PR that implements this feature.


In Aug 23, 2021, a crowdfund was started to implement this feature in three phases:

  1. Ability to send and accept Secret Chat requests
  2. Ability to send and receive encrypted messages in estabilished Secret Chats
  3. Re-keying (PFS) and media sharing in Secret Chats

a community member named sergiotarxz, who had no prior experience with Telegram desktop code base, started working on the issue on May 20, 2022 and finished phase one on May 29, 2022, in only 9 Days, and phase two on Jun 17, 2022 in around 50 days.


In an investigation done by another community member, lukejohnsonrp, it turns out that:
  • All the functionality related to DH key exchange is also present in Telegram Desktop, because mtproto use it for transport layer security and cloud chats.
  • And of course there is absolutely no need to migrate Telegram Desktop to TDLib in order to implement secret chats.



So, are Telegram desktop devs lacking in skills, or is there some other reason?


Here are some of the misleading arguments on their FAQ about Why are there no Secret Chats on desktop apps?

It's time to act

Since Telegram Desktop is an open source software, we, the community, can implement the feature without needing to wait for official developers to do so. Hence we have created an initiative to speed up the implementation and will sponsor the devs who will work on it. This work currently is happening in this GitHub issue [Feature Request] Secret Chats in Telegram Desktop #2 and you can contribute to it right now.




Github issues that have been opened regarding secret chats: #5 #68 #73 #118 #162 #236 #246 #363 #598 #619 #654 #777 #871 #1545 #1958 #2610 #3731 #4416 #4438 #4517 #4518 #4591 #5080 #5493 #6491 #6701 #6770 #6771 #6953 #7563 #7934 #8050 #8071 #8091 #10162 #16388 #16772 #16835 #16878 #16938 #17216 #24510 #24829