Telegram Bots

Day 283 / 366

My team has been working on a telegram bot as a prototype for a new AI-based product. It was my idea to make it a Telegram bot instead of a dedicated Android app. I wanted us to be able to ship something quickly. Also, a user will much more easily use a Telegram bot rather than download a separate app and log in.

But a week into building this, I am starting to have second thoughts.

Firstly, telegram bots are great for simple conversational apps, like a grammar correction app, or a simple ChatGPT clone. But when you move on to slightly more complicated apps, things get tricky. For instance, we experimented with adding inline buttons in our Telegram bot. It was not easy. The documentation wasn’t clear as well, and there was no good way to maintain the state.

It got me thinking about how easy or difficult it would have been to do that in a separate Android app. And how much better the UX would have been that way. Would using something like Flutter or React Native have made it faster?

While we won’t leave the telegram bot prototype midway, I think starting next week it might me better to start working on an app for our product as well.