Telegram to award grants to bot developers

Telegram user here. I&#x27;m not anti-bot but puh-lease, spend this money on audited open-source crypto and secret-by-default chats rather than gimmicks like &#x27;stickers&#x27; (yuk) and rewards for promising bots.<p>I want a messaging app that&#x27;s simple, secure, open and cross-device. Not one that&#x27;s splurging on daft bloatware features while the key issues go unaddressed.<p>[edit] to clarify the term &#x27;cross-device&#x27; - I mean I want to see my conversations on my phone, tablet and laptop and easily swap from one device to another. Platform support is a separate, also-important issue that Telegram already has nailed.

Underneath the original &quot;wow factor&quot;, I think bots have a glaring UX problem. Developers just haven&#x27;t figured out the real use-case for bots. In some ways, I think this current bot-craze is very similar to what happened with smartwatches 2 years ago. Simply cramming a phone app into a watch doesn&#x27;t make it magically awesome or useful.<p>I think a lot of developers seem to be taking the same approach with bots. They are trying to create alternative UIs for their already existing mobile apps through bots. Mobile &#x2F; web apps do a lot of the same stuff as bots in a much more user-friendly way. Take a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storebot.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storebot.me&#x2F;</a> and tell me if there&#x27;s one bot that can do something better than a mobile app.<p>I&#x27;m not anti-bot but I just think the bot-frenzy is premature,

Wow all these comments are so negative. Do the smart thing, spend some hours building a bot and put some money in the bank instead of complaining.

What about API library developers [1]? We haven&#x27;t received anything yet but thanks to us others can build bots. I invented the Telegram bots back in 2014 [2] (there wasn&#x27;t API) and haven&#x27;t received any thanks from Telegram.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;TelegramBots&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3bsec7&#x2F;unofficial_collection_of_api_wrappers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;TelegramBots&#x2F;comments&#x2F;3bsec7&#x2F;unoffi...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yagop&#x2F;telegram-bot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yagop&#x2F;telegram-bot</a>

Would Telegram let you develop a &quot;bot&quot; that supports connections to other messaging systems? Or are they into the walled garden with spikes on top of the wall thing?

If they have $1M to invest, why don&#x27;t they focus on securing their protocol (i.e. switching to authenticated encryption) and turning encryption on by default?<p>See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.au.dk&#x2F;~jakjak&#x2F;master-thesis.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.au.dk&#x2F;~jakjak&#x2F;master-thesis.pdf</a> for more on why Telegram isn&#x27;t secure and you shouldn&#x27;t trust it (as it is today) for anything requiring privacy.

I&#x27;ve noticed bots seem to be quite popular for telegram. Is there any way to provide the same to signal users?

So telegram is a non-profit. And they splurge 1M USD? What am I missing?<p>Edit: to clarify, what I meant is that I expected non-profits to make good use of their money and not give away large sums of money in prize competitions. Certainly, no NGO or non-profit I know of does this. Raises a red flag for me.

@watchbot is a useful bot for monitoring uptime, but I am afraid that it also probably gives FSB my uptime information, and I do not have control over that.

So many negative comments, would like to see what happens if exact same title would be with Facebook, considering their scale lets say &#x27;Facebook: $10Mln to Bot Developers. For free.&#x27;.<p>Do not forget, they may have some issues with security or user growth, but founder generally tries to promote his own product, everyone will behave like he does (promote in product in any legal way), when they have enough resources.

So you have to make the bot first and then be awarded the grant?

The &quot;We like it when bots also work in &gt;inline mode&lt;&quot; link is missing the p in https.

Why not allow charging for bots and stickers? It stifles bot innovation as there are many great bots that have real costs that must be sustained somehow. Same with stickers. Great artists have <i>zero</i> incentive to make sticker packs since they can&#x27;t charge for them and anyone can give them away to other users.<p>Developers and artists should be treated like stakeholders rather than cannon-fodder and free labor.

Can someone explain to me what bots are for. It looks like using something similar to a REST API over Telegram. Whats the point &#x2F; use &#x2F; advantage of that?

When is the deadline? I couldn&#x27;t find that on the site.

Does anybody know what sort of bots they are looking for?

Does anybody know if games created using the Telegram Bot API are included for this grant?<p>I created a GIF sharing game bot with a few friends and we are going to apply and it&#x27;d be great to get this!<p>We&#x27;d love some feedback - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrwgame.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrwgame.com&#x2F;</a>