The Telega messenger not only reads user correspondence, but can also turn an iPhone into a “brick”

No one knows for sure why this happens. The developers themselves suggest that they were subjected to a “PR attack”

The last month has been unsuccessful for the creators of Telega, an unofficial alternative Telegram client. At first it turned out that the messenger monitors users and can even read all their correspondence. Then Telega was removed from the App Store, considering it spyware. And recently it became known that the application can turn an iPhone into a “brick”. Meduza tells what has been happening to the Telega client over the past month, and reminds us once again that it is better not to use it.

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The unofficial alternative telegram client Telega was released at the beginning of 2025. In the fall of the same year, it began to rapidly gain popularity. All because it gave users the opportunity to communicate without a VPN. By that time, the official Telegram client had already been under Roskomnadzor restrictions for a couple of months - the agency blocked audio and video calls on it.

Experts almost immediately had doubts about the safety of Telega. They noticed that the developers from Kazan, who released an alternative client, may be closely associated with the VK company. The creators of Telega themselves did not deny that they use a number of VK technologies, but insisted that their project remains independent.

Despite the suspicions, the alternative client continued to gain an audience. At the end of March 2026, almost 7.5 million people actively used it per month, Kommersant wrote , citing research data from MTS. Journalists noted that Telega became the main replacement for the official Telegram application, which at that time had already been under strict blocking by the RKN for several weeks.

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Then, in March, new evidence of a connection between Telega and VK began to emerge. And at the end of the month, two studies were released ( the first anonymous, the second from RKS Global ), which claimed that this client spies on users. Moreover, its owners see all user activity in Telegram, can read correspondence and transfer it to intelligence services upon request.

Telegram responded to this and removed the verification checkbox from the official Telegram channel Telega. However, the channel itself continues to operate and gain popularity - in a month its audience has increased by almost 650 thousand subscribers. The channel did not comment on the accusations of spying on users.

Many users were perplexed why Telegram did not interfere in any way with the operation of such a dangerous alternative client. In particular, this question addressed to Pavel Durov was one of the most popular in a recent Meduza survey . The only thing the team of the official messenger did was add a warning to their application that the interlocutor is using a third-party client and now the messages are less secure.

Apple also unexpectedly joined the fight. On April 9, it removed the Telega app from its digital App Store (it is still available on Google Play). And a week later, owners of iOS devices began to be warned about the dangers of the messenger. The system message said that the application contained malicious code and should be removed.

Telega developers had to react. They first stated that the removal from the App Store could be due to a sharp increase in negative reviews. And they, in turn, appeared due to the introduction of a “waiting list” . “This surge in reviews could have been misinterpreted by App Store moderation,” the client’s creators suggested.

However, after a couple of days they confirmed that the reason for deletion was the “erroneous classification” that Cloudflare assigned to the messenger. The company flagged two domains of the Telega project as spyware, which is why the application’s TLS certificate was revoked, explained the telegram channel “Caution, News.”

The creators of the alternative client claim that they have already passed all the necessary independent checks and allegedly proved that their messenger is not dangerous. But, according to them, Apple's verification takes longer, which is why Telega has not yet returned to the App Store.

On April 19, Telega had a new problem. iPhone owners began to complain that the application causes a critical failure during an operating system update. As a result, the process was interrupted and the device was completely blocked, turning into a useless “brick.”

Employees of several service centers told the Durov Code publication that the update failure was due to the presence of the Telega messenger on the device. However, at first the editors ignored this information, considering it insufficiently reliable. It is also still unknown how widespread this problem is.

Later, tech blogger Sergei Romantsev wrote that he conducted an experiment and updated three working iPhones. On one of them - with the Telega messenger installed - the described failure actually occurred.

The application developers denied this information, saying that the problems had nothing to do with the presence of their client on users’ iPhones. They supported their statement with a link to the official Apple website, which states that third-party applications are separated from system files and cannot make changes to the operation of the device. The creators of Telega also hinted that such publications could be part of “PR attacks” directed against their messenger.

Romantsev suggests that the problem lies in the update itself, or more precisely in Apple’s message about the presence of malware in the system. This is probably why the crash occurs. It turns out that the company is forcing the user to get rid of Telega, since after restoring the smartphone from a backup, the messenger simply does not load, since it is not in the App Store.

One way or another, this is just one of the reasons not to use Telega. Even if the messenger is returned to the App Store, as the developers claim, questions (and very serious ones at that) regarding the security of the messenger still remain.

"Jellyfish"