Telegram Returns to Smartwatches After Years Away — Native Apps Now Live for Apple Watch and Wear OS

Telegram Returns to Smartwatches After Years Away — Native Apps Now Live for Apple Watch and Wear OS SUBHEADLINE: Five years after going dark on wearables, Telegram is back with full-featured native apps for both watchOS and Wear OS. ESTIMATED READ TIME: 6 min read After years of silence on smartwatches, Telegram has made a quiet but significant comeback to the wrist. The messaging platform — one of the world's most popular with over 900 million monthly active users — has launched native apps for both Apple Watch and Wear OS, ending a multi-year absence that left fans relying on clunky third-party workarounds and bare-bones notification mirrors. The announcement came from Telegram CEO Pavel Durov himself on June 9, 2026, via a post on X: "A fully native Telegram app for Apple Watch is out." Two days later, Wear OS followed. For anyone who has been waiting years to use Telegram properly from their wrist, the wait is finally over. A Long Time Coming: The History of Telegram on Wearables To appreciate what this relaunch means, it helps to understand just how long Telegram has been absent from smartwatches. Telegram was actually among the first messaging apps to embrace wearable technology. When Apple Watch launched in 2015, Telegram was right there with a native watchOS app, shipping support with Telegram 3.0. It was a bold early move — and a sign of the company's ambition. But enthusiasm for the platform waned over time. Adoption was low, App Store approval processes created friction, and the company quietly pulled the watchOS app around 2022. Wear OS met a similar fate even earlier: Telegram dropped support for Google's wearable platform entirely in 2021, leaving Galaxy Watch and other Android smartwatch users without an official option. For five years on Wear OS, and roughly three to four years on Apple Watch, Telegram simply did not exist as a first-party experience on wearables. That changes now. What the New Apple Watch App Can Do The revived watchOS app is not the stripped-down companion widget many expected. It is a proper, standalone Telegram client built natively for the Apple Watch — and it shows. Setting it up is straightforward. When you first launch Telegram on your Apple Watch, the app displays a QR code. Open Telegram on your iPhone, scan it, and you're linked. If you have a cloud password enabled on your account, you'll be prompted to enter it as an additional security step. After that, you're in. The feature set is impressively complete for a wrist-sized device. Users get full access to their contacts and chat histories, can send text replies, record and play back voice messages, and browse GIFs and videos directly on the watch. Stickers and location sharing round out the current feature list — making this one of the more capable messaging experiences on watchOS from any platform. Critically, the app works independently of your iPhone. As long as your Apple Watch has an internet connection — whether via Wi-Fi or a cellular plan — Telegram functions without your phone nearby. This is a meaningful distinction. It means commuters who leave their phone at their desk, runners who head out without their handset, or anyone who simply prefers wrist-first interactions can stay fully connected on Telegram without compromise. Wear OS Gets Its First Proper Telegram App in Years While the Apple Watch announcement grabbed the most initial attention — partly because Durov announced it personally on X — the Wear OS release is arguably even more significant from a market perspective. When Telegram last had a Wear OS app in 2021, the landscape looked very different. The Pixel Watch did not yet exist. Samsung's Galaxy Watch lineup was still running Tizen, not Wear OS. The platform was a fragmented, underpowered ecosystem that struggled to attract major app developers. Five years later, Wear OS has matured considerably. Google's Pixel Watch 2 and 3 have been well received. Samsung's Galaxy Watch 7 and 8 series — which run Wear OS — are among the best-selling smartwatches in the world. The ecosystem now has real scale. The new Telegram Wear OS app lands on all of that. Every eligible Galaxy Watch model gets access, as does the Pixel Watch. The interface is notably close to the phone experience — even chat backgrounds from your connected Android device carry over to the watch display, a small but telling detail about the care put into the app's design. Feature-wise, Wear OS users get full chat viewing, voice message recording and playback, and a suite of chat management tools that actually goes beyond what's currently available on Apple Watch. You can pin conversations, mute groups, and delete messages directly from your wrist. These are not passive notification features — they are active tools for managing your Telegram life from a 1.5-inch screen. The Feature Gap — and Why It Exists There is one honest caveat to the launch: the two apps are not yet feature-identical, and Telegram has been upfront about why. The Apple Watch version currently supports stickers and location sharing, which Wear OS does not yet have. Conversely, Wear OS gets the chat management tools — pinning, muting, deleting — that are missing from watchOS for now. It is a curious split, and Telegram explains it plainly: the iOS and Android development teams work independently, and their different priorities led to different feature rollouts at launch. The company has confirmed that the missing features on each platform are in development and will arrive in a future update. For most users, this asymmetry will be barely noticeable in day-to-day use. The core experience — reading messages, replying, sending voice notes — works on both platforms. Power users who rely heavily on location sharing within Telegram will want to favour the Apple Watch version for now, while Android users who manage large group chats from their watch will appreciate the moderation tools Wear OS already provides. What This Means for the Messaging App Wars Telegram's return to wearables is not just a technical update — it is a strategic signal. The company has spent the last two years expanding aggressively: adding guest bots, custom AI styles, chat automation, login-with-Telegram features, and a full Liquid Glass redesign on Android. The smartwatch apps are another piece of a broader push to make Telegram a platform that rivals iMessage and WhatsApp on every surface, every device, every context. WhatsApp launched native Apple Watch support in 2023 and has been iterating on it since. iMessage, of course, is deeply embedded in Apple's wearable ecosystem. Signal — often compared to Telegram on privacy grounds — still does not have a native watch app for either platform. By launching simultaneously on watchOS and Wear OS, Telegram has leapfrogged Signal entirely and drawn level with WhatsApp on wearable reach. For the 900-million-plus Telegram user base, this matters. Messaging has become a wrist-native behaviour for millions of people who upgraded to smartwatches specifically to reduce how often they pull out their phones. Until this week, Telegram was asking those users to compromise. That compromise is now over. Looking Ahead Telegram's update also included a range of other improvements that signal continued development momentum: upgrades to bot text formatting, the ability to include links in poll options, markdown file support, and new options for managing how Telegram handles external links — including a long-press gesture to open URLs in your preferred browser rather than Telegram's built-in one. The smartwatch apps are the headline, but the broader picture is of a platform that is moving fast on multiple fronts simultaneously. The uneven feature split between watchOS and Wear OS will close. The apps will mature. And Telegram's presence on the wrist — after years of absence — looks like it is here to stay this time. For anyone who has spent years waiting for a proper Telegram experience on their Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch, the message is simple: check your App Store update queue. Your wait is over.