Inline Bots become miniApps: Introducing Webbots

Telegram is the defacto home for pretty much all TON projects.

Many teams rely on the messenger as a core part of their product experience. Bots in particular are a way to interact with and serve Telegram's 600,000,000 monthly active users. With a powerful API, they are an excellent tool to bring TON apps and DeFi to the a wider audience.

But, quite frankly, the UI and UX of inline bots is pretty complex, some might even say poor? Not everyone is able to use /commands. Historically, inline terminal-like commands – or a trivially simple button interface – was the only way to interact with bots.

No more.

@tginfoen recently showed us a sneak peek of an upcoming upgrade to bots called 'web bots'. Much like mini-apps, web bots let developers build web-integrated GUI with pretty interfaces.

Documentation is not yet live (though we're told it should drop very soon!), but a demo bot – @DurgerKingBot – run in the latest versions of Telegram gives us an overview.