Suggestions ​

I have been around for a while, developing Telegram Web Apps and here are some suggestions that I could make to Telegram Dev Team for improving the overall experience of Telegram WebApps Development for developers.

Server Side ​

Telegram Pages ​

It would be nice to have a native Telegram Pages system, just as Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages exist, It could make serving WebApps easier and without the need of external static file servers.

Ofcourse a proper caching system could be integrated in the ecosystem based on file changes, so that we could leverage the benefit of 0 loading time experience of webApps.

CloudSpace ​

It would be nice to have a CloudSpace dedicated for each WebApp per each user, a small space like 50MB per user would be a nice option, just as CloudStorage exists, the CloudSpace could complement it.

Users can create/edit files and interact with them, for example a drawing webApp that let's users save their works into CloudSpace and access them later.

Real-Time Event System ​

It would be nice to have a native WebSocket connection to Telegram for broadcasting events across all the active sessions of the user in WebApp.

Just like SimpList uses Pusher to achieve this Synchronization, Suppose that I have the WebApp open both in my Desktop and iOS Clients at the same time, I add one task from iOS, How could my Desktop client receive the event to update itself? There is no native way of Syncing clients in Real-Time, We have to rely on 3rd party WebSocket implementations.

CloudStorage improvements ​

CloudStorage was a nice addition to the WebApps, but it could be even better. It's design structure seems very familiar to LocalStorage of Javascript, but it could burrow some ideas from other Storages too.

It would be very nice to setItem with expiry date, for example a status emoji for the user that gets cleared at max 24 hours.

It would also be very nice to have access to created_at, updated_at, accessed_at meta data for each item, right now I have to store these data in my value field.

It would also be nice to be able to query items by key or value or created_at, updated_at, accessed_at, for example: Query the tasks that added since last week unix timestamp.

Client Side ​

Installable WebApps (Offline) ​

WebApps are usually built with modern technology frameworks and they usually have Service Workers and etc to be able to function offline, but Telegram does not provide a solution to leverage this ability.

For example, a ToDo List app can function offline too, it will save it's data to LocalStorage and Syncs to CloudStorage when network is available.

Provide native client font ​

WebApps are usually intended to look exactly as Telegram looks, that's why most of the time we load both Roboto family and SF Pro family and choose what to display based on the client OS, these fonts are near 2MB download size and they block rendering the text until loaded, or the text gets rendered in ugly font and then font re-assign happens which is not a good UX.

It would be nice if Telegram Clients inject their own Native font files into the WebView and make them accessible via CSS, like:

font-family: TGFont, Arial, Tahoma;

font-family: TGFont, Arial, Tahoma;