Telegram Watch Apps Return as Two Mismatched Products

Telegram put native apps on Apple Watch and Wear OS in June 2026, five years after it killed the last Wear OS client. CEO Pavel Durov called the Apple Watch build fully native on June 9, then told Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch and Xiaomi Watch owners to enjoy Wear OS two days later.

The two apps did not match. Telegram’s own blog treated that split as a joke and said the teams would swap missing tools in the next update. The next two official blogs never mentioned watches.

Two Watch Apps Landed Two Days Apart

Durov posted the Apple Watch app first. The June 9 note was one line: a fully native Telegram app for Apple Watch is out.

⌚️ A fully native Telegram app for Apple Watch is out. pic.twitter.com/3wSr5igssE

— Pavel Durov (@durov) June 9, 2026

The Wear OS client followed on June 11, 2026, in the same drop as a long list of phone features. Durov named Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch and Xiaomi Watch in the post and left it at that.

Telegram is now on Wear OS.

Owners of Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch, Xiaomi Watch and other smartwatches — enjoy! ☕️ pic.twitter.com/Rmvel99ziW

— Pavel Durov (@durov) June 11, 2026

That two days gap is typical Telegram. iOS and Android still ship as separate products, often on separate clocks, and the watch apps made the habit visible on a 40-millimeter screen. Replies under the Wear OS post filled up with crypto chatter instead of bug reports about stickers or mute, so the launch never turned into a public punch list.

Telegram Left Wear OS at the Worst Moment

This is not Telegram’s first watch cycle. Telegram 3.0 on June 24, 2015 added Apple Watch support with recent chats, stickers, locations, emoji, preset phrases and dictated replies. The company said the watch should do as much as the platform allowed, and more than other messengers.

On February 9, 2017, the same blog introduced Telegram for Android Wear 2.0. Google had just moved Wear to Android Wear 2.0 standalone apps, and Telegram called its client compact, beautiful and super-fast. Users could browse chats, reply with voice, text, emoji or stickers, open contacts, and create groups from the watch.

That Android client died with Telegram v8.0. On September 1, 2021, it vanished from the Wear OS Play Store. Telegram Support said the Wear OS app would not be available to download anymore, and that copies already on a watch may stop working soon. No public note explained why.

The timing was brutal. Samsung had just put Galaxy Watch 4 on Wear OS after years of Tizen, and Pixel Watch did not exist yet. Telegram walked away as Google’s watch platform was being rebuilt, then spent five years as a notification on someone else’s lock screen.

What Each Wrist Got in June

The June 11 blog listed a shared core: send text and voice, listen to voice notes, view media and video, and read long messages. After that, the extras diverged by team.

JUNE 2026 WATCH FEATURES

Wear OS users got the janitor tools. Apple Watch users got the social ones. Anyone who lives in huge groups will notice the mute and pin gap on Apple Watch first. Anyone who talks in stickers will notice it on a Pixel Watch.

Beta testers could install Wear OS from May 29 if they were already in Telegram’s Play Store beta. The public blog still arrived on June 11, and Durov still had to tell people the Android watch existed.

The Blog Treated the Split as a Joke

Telegram did not hide the mismatch. The June 11 post named the two developers, shrugged, and promised a trade.

For some reason, our Android developer added muting and pinning chats, as well as deleting messages. Meanwhile, the iOS developer added viewing locations and sending stickers. Why?? We will never know. We’ve convinced them to steal these features from each other in the next update.

The Telegram Team, June 11, 2026 blog

That line is the product. The company asked readers to steal these features from each other as if the gap were a sitcom beat. Huawei owners who cannot run Wear OS were told to ask nicely, and the same paragraph said developers would make them an app too. Truly odd hardware got a shrug: watch a clip, or write your own client on the open API.

The joke works only if the next update actually lands. Telegram ships often. It had room.

July and August Changelogs Never Closed the Loop

The next official posts were not small. They just were not about watches.

THE 2026 WATCH TRAIL

1. May 29, 2026: Wear OS app appears for Play Store beta testers.
2. June 9, 2026: Durov posts the native Apple Watch app.
3. June 11, 2026: Wear OS goes public and the blog promises a feature swap in the next update.
4. July 14, 2026: Blog covers a rich text editor, Communities, ephemeral group messages and 350 million GIFs. No watch note.
5. August 25, 2026: Blog covers welcome messages, buttons in messages and signed gifts. No watch note.

Silent Play Store patches can happen. Telegram did not close the public promise in either changelog, and it did not reuse the June punchline. For a company that blogs almost every feature it wants credit for, that silence is the record.

Some people never waited. One builder spent August on a custom phone-to-watch Telegram setup because a Wear OS face still felt too small for group chat, which is a reminder that Telegram’s real pressure on a watch is long threads, not one-line pings.

Bots Got a 32,768-Character Canvas in the Same Drop

The watch apps were the headline. The rest of the June 11 drop was built for bots, groups and the in-app browser.

ALSO IN THE JUNE 11 UPDATE

• Bot length: Bots can send rich messages up to 32,768 characters, with a Show More break after about 8,000.
• Rich text: Tables, nested blockquotes, headings, anchors, collapsible sections, footnotes, math, superscript and subscript, plus inline media, carousels and collages.
• AI guardians: Admins can add AI bots to screen join requests, and those bots can act in the chat if the group wants that.
• Polls: Poll options can include links.
• Files: The in-app browser opens.md Markdown files as rendered text.
• Links: A long press sends a URL to another browser, and both Android and iOS can whitelist sites that always open, or never open, inside Telegram. The blog says the Telegram Browser does not store history.
• Android chrome: New header bars show more of the chat list.

Browser settings live under Settings, Chat Settings, In-App Browser on Android, and under Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Links in on iOS. That is a lot of product for one Wednesday. It is also a lot of product that is not a sticker on Wear OS.

Pixel Watch Never Had a Telegram App Before

When Telegram last supported Wear OS, Pixel Watch was not on sale and most Galaxy Watches still ran Tizen. Galaxy Watch 4 had just switched to Wear OS, then lost Telegram with v8.0. The June 2026 client is the first official Telegram app many of those wrists have ever seen.

WhatsApp has had watch software on both platforms for some time, so Telegram is late to a table that already had a messenger. What it brings is Telegram’s actual chat style: huge groups, long voice notes, stickers, locations, and threads that do not fit a notification card. That is why a mute button and a sticker picker are not trivia. They are how people use this app.

Huawei owners are still in the June footnote, asked to request an app politely. Apple Watch and Wear OS users are in the same footnote in a different way, waiting on two developers to copy each other’s homework. The August 25 blog moved on to welcome messages, buttons in messages and signed gifts. It did not mention watches.