In reality, choosing Telegram wasn't immediate or planned, but rather the result of a natural progression. I started using Telegram in 2017, at the suggestion of a colleague while I was working at a startup; it was the primary communication tool within the team. From there, over time, I began to meet more and more people and feel part of the environment.
Many of the people I met were bot developers and open source projects, like Bruno, Guard, Tappo, and Xene. Hanging out with this community almost naturally made me want to develop on Telegram, because it was a vibrant, collaborative, and technically stimulating ecosystem.
Compared to other messaging platforms, Telegram offers features that are hard to find elsewhere: a strong focus on developers, powerful and relatively open APIs, a highly active community, and a user-centric philosophy. Being a free platform, with an open source foundation and no aggressive advertising model, has fostered a healthier environment for experimentation and collaboration.
It's precisely this combination, technique, community, and vision, that has driven me to stay on Telegram and invest so much time and effort into it.
4⃣ Do you have any future plans or projects ready to be released to the public?
I currently have no projects ready for immediate release to the public. I prefer to be very cautious about this aspect, because over the years I've learned that releasing something just for the sake of "releasing" a project rarely yields good results.
That said, there are some interesting ideas and possibilities. One in particular concerns NTgCalls: the core is currently already compiled on Android and is used unofficially by projects like Telegram X. In the future, I would like to be able to collaborate more directly with developers in the Telegram Android ecosystem to create a more robust and official integration.
For now, however, I prefer to focus on improving and maintaining what exists, rather than announcing new releases without the right technical maturity behind them.
5⃣ As a developer, what would you like to see on Telegram that the platform doesn't offer today?
As a developer, there are several aspects of Telegram that could be improved. One of the main points concerns group calls: it would be very useful to allow bots to officially join calls, without having to resort to solutions like RTMP streaming or userbots.
RTMP, besides being a technically inelegant solution, also introduces trust and security issues. It requires providing a bot with streaming keys or sensitive credentials, and many users aren't comfortable sharing this type of information with third-party software that could potentially cause damage or be compromised. Furthermore, an RTMP stream doesn't allow the bot to actually participate in the call, severely limiting interaction.
Another important aspect concerns the Bot API. Over time, the community has requested many features that are still only accessible via MTProto. This separation is difficult to justify from a development perspective: making more calls available in the Bot API would make the ecosystem more coherent and accessible.
Overall, Telegram has huge potential for developers, and with small but targeted improvements it could become even more robust and complete.