Most ideas for Web bots won't come true in the near future

Earlier, Telegram Info team made an article exploring the possibilities of the new Web bot platform. Alas, we won't be able to see most of the proposed integrations in the foreseeable future.

The ability to open Web interfaces within Telegram is available to everyone and essentially duplicates the features of the Telegram game platform, which was launched in 2016.

The official Web bots documentation states that "Attachment menu integration is currently only available for major advertisers on the Telegram Ad Platform." This means that the new feature will only be available to literally a few developers, mentioning the fact that in order to participate in the Ad Platform you need to have at least €2,000,000 at your disposal.

Thus, the Attachment menu integration is an option only for large companies participating in the Ad Platform or for developers that are close to Telegram, and it works only in private chats.

The food ordering bot @DurgerKingBot was developed by the Telegram team to demonstrate the new feature. Ironically, in reality this bot wouldn't have been able to get this feature, since fast food ads are banned by Telegram's Ad Platform rules.

The platform is already seeing some problems: the bot's web pop-up blocks interaction with the app's main window, which makes it useless for, for example, a video calls bot: you can't use Telegram and communicate with the person you're talking to via call at the same time. Also, the Telegram team did not offer a standardized library for creating interfaces, so different bots may look different and not fit in the application's overall design.

Telegram Info team believes that the feature was originally intended as an exclusive opportunity to integrate TON Coin with Telegram, although there is no direct evidence of that. The opinion, in particular, is based on the fact that TON actively uses Telegram's advertising platform. TON developers have already implemented similar functionality themselves as a browser extension for the Web versions of Telegram.

In its documentation, the Telegram team does not hint at the possibility of extending access to the feature in the future. It is likely that the ability to integrate into the Attachment menu will remain exclusive to "closely related" bots, and we will not see integrations like "pick files from Google Drive and send them in Telegram".