How I Built An App For Telegra.ph

Update: I haven’t updated the app in years and don’t plan to do so. The app is unmaintained and not available on Google Play anymore.

Telegra.ph is Telegram’s new Medium alternative made for easy and also anonymous publishing. It’s quite similar to Medium, except the need to log in. Of course you CAN log in, but it isn’t necessary.

I build an app for this new platform, because visiting Telegra.ph in the mobile browser on my phone worked, but text formatting didn’t.

A month ago I started this project and it was just a simple wrapper, which uses the build in WebView on Android, so formatting still didn’t work. The only use was, that I didn’t need to type t-e-l-e-g-r-a-.-p-h in the browser anymore. I wasn’t able to code something better, because the API wasn’t open yet.

But now it is.

Telegram’s blog about Telegra.ph

Telegra.ph API documentation

So when I heard about this last Friday, I immediately stopped my work on another (more or less failed) project and resumed my work on my app Teleposter. Catchy name right?

Now after spending one and a half day learning the API specs and making everything to work (I had to debug around 500 times), it finally has more use and feels more native, although the most things still run in a WebView.

But in this new version, the app isn’t just showing the Telegra.ph page itself in a WebView. No, I build an own Viewer and Editor with my great HTML and JavaScript skills. And formatting FINALLY WORKS! The app is coded completely in Kotlin.

Download Teleposter on Google Play

When I started developing things, I didn’t want to share my code with others. I thought it is too much work, to set up a Git and create an repository on GitHub. But since I changed my mind, I publish almost every project on GitHub. Same goes with Teleposter:

Teleposter on Github

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