3 years ago, Telegram founder Pavel Durov commisioned a “Telegram Android Challenge”, a contest that was meant to encourage Telegram developers to embrace the Telegram Development Library, abbreviated as TDLib, which is a cross-platform library for building Telegram clients. The challenge’s winner, the aptly-named Challegram, was revealed in March 2016.
Challegram, an unofficial Telegram client, came to be a darling of its users. Turns out, even the people at Telegram loved it since it did not take them long to acquire it. The last update to Challegram, at least as far as we know, is from 10 months. As fate would have it, today, Challegram lives on as another Telegram spin-off, Telegram X.
Telegram X is not a big departure from the traditional Telegram app on Android. The layout is simple. It has all the familiar design aesthetics to get old Telegram users going but it’s shed some fat to make it lighter and faster and, quite noticeably, added a few new features like night mode. Yes, now a darkened mode is just a toggle away.
The lack of such features is what has driven users like yours truly to third-party clients like Plus Messenger which supports a wide range of themes that allow users to completely customize and take charge of their Telegram experience. Apparently, this is not an outlier, it’s supposed to be the norm rather than the exception.
So now, is it read as Telegram X (exe) like in every other tech experiment or Telegram 10 (because, Roman numerals) as 2017’s tech theatrics had us going?
Grab Telegram X from the Play Store
You can sign up to beta test (some other version) Telegram X here
