These groups can be public or private and you can assign several administrators.

Telegram groups are ideal for sharing stuff with friends and family, or collaboration in teams of up to 200,000 members.

What's the difference between Telegram groups and channels? Telegram became one of the top-5 downloaded apps worldwide in 2023 and now has over 700 million monthly active users. Telegram secret chats offer end-to-end encryption. Plus, you can share videos up to 2GB, send multiple photos from the web, and forward any media you receive in an instant.Īll messages are in the cloud, so you can access them from any of your devices. I would opt for the factory reset old phone route though.With Telegram, you can create group chats with up to 200,000 people so you can stay connected with everyone at once.

Now authenticate the web client (on your PC's browser, so outside of the emulator).

Enter the verification code into Telegram.

Click next (and wait for 2 minutes for the text message to fail and Telegram to call you with an automated message).

Log into google (you will need an account to access the play store - but this can be a dummy account without a contact list).

Install emulator on PC (for example this one).

Assuming you don't connect that same emulator instance to an account that has a contact list, Telegram will never have the opportunity to access it. If you don't have one of these, there fortunately are emulators that allow you to run these from a PC. You can then either use Telegram on that phone, or use it to authenticate a web client on your PC. As with the second option you can use a dummy google account that has an empty contact list. Then you follow the regular install route and authenticate the web client. The simplest option is to use a factory erased old phone that still supports Telegram (at least Android 4.1 or iOS 9.0 at the time of writing). You would still need a mobile platform though, which brings us back to that contact list.

Telegram will first attempt to send a text message, and if that fails after two minutes call with an automated message that contains an authentication code. The easiest is using a landline and voice authentication. As with all the other mobile IM platforms authentication is required (and therefore a phone number), however there are ways around using a mobile number.

Install telegram app for android