- Confidential and Proprietary - Luminar Annual Threat Landscape Report Page 12 3.2.4 APIs and Bots Telegram has a free, open API and source code. The app offers three kinds of APIs for developers: 27 + Telegram API - An open API that allows developers to create Telegram applications and customized Telegram clients. + TDLib - Telegram Database Library (aka TDLib) is a tool for third-party developers that enables the creation of fast, secure, and feature-rich Telegram apps on Linux or virtually any other system. The library is open source and compatible with virtually any programming language. + Bot API – allows users to create programs that use Telegram messages and handle the encryption and communication for the Bot developers. Bots are small applications within the Telegram app operated by third-party developers using the Telegram Bot API and platform, which hosts more than 10 million bots and is free for both users and developers. The bots can host full Web Apps built with JavaScript. Users interact with bots through interfaces that can support different kinds of tasks or services. The bots offer functions and automations that Telegram users can integrate in their chats, channels, or groups. Thus, they can allow users to share media, play games, moderate channels, and perform other automated tasks. 28 Users can interact with bots via inline queries. If those are enabled, users can call a bot by typing its username and a query in the text input field in any chat. The query is sent to the bot in an update. This way, people can request content from bots in chats, groups, or channels without sending messages. 29 3.2.5 Additional Features In addition to the aforementioned features, the following significantly contribute to Telegram’s convenience in accessibility among its users: + Instant view: allows users to view web articles without loading time. With this feature, Telegram users can read articles from mass media or blogs in a uniform and readable way. Instant View pages support text and media of any type and work even if the original website was not optimized for mobile devices. Furthermore, Instant View pages are lightweight and cached on the Telegram servers, so they load fast. 30 + Telegraph: a publishing tool used to create formatted posts with photos and embedded 27 https://core.telegram.org/api 28 https://core.telegram.org/bots 29 https://core.telegram.org/bots/inline 30 https://instantview.telegram.org/