How to create a link to contact specific phone number via Telegram?

Question

So I found out I could use a link like this in HTML:

<a href="https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone={{phone_number}}" target="_blank">WhatsApp</a>

in order to let a user contact {{phone_number}} directly from a webpage (via WhatsApp web).

My question is: how to do the same but instead of WhatsApp, via Telegram?

Kenward

https://mcmap.net/q/400427/-how-to-create-a-link-to-contact-specific-phone-number-via-telegram Why isn't this a limitation with WhatsApp? – Corner

Whatsapp doesn't respect users' privacy and allows governments to crawl and store user's data easily. That's one of the reasons authoritarian regimes such as Iran have blocked Telegram but not Whatsapp. – Interrogatory

Answer 1

Update (2022):

Links to phone numbers such as https://t.me/+1XXXXXXX will lead you to a web page the same as username links do, but you can only start chatting with the user if their privacy settings allows you.

Old answer:

It's NOT possible to link to Telegram like this for a phone numbers so far, because every user MUST add the phone number to their contact list before they can send a message to them by phone number. This limitation is because of Telegram privacy policy and abuse prevention. In more details, if Telegram allow this type of linking, a malicious party can fetch a web page like https://t.me/+1XXXXXXX for every possible number without passing authentication. That's most probably why Telegram doesn't have such linking feature.

However, you can link to @username of a Telegram user if he/she has any:

https://t.me/username

Interrogatory

The answer seems to be outdated, because now t.me/+1XXXXXXX works fine – Vascular

Pardon me, it works only for Telegram Desktop, but still not working for the app ((( – Vascular

@GeorgySpassky hey it does work on the mobile app as well – Bestride

Looks like it has some limitation per account. At some point telegrams start saying "user not found" – Resident

Answer 2

You should create a link like https://telegram.me/YourUsername for that purpose.

Check Telegram blog for more info.

Ru

Answer 3

It is possible to create links to Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal accounts using their associated phone numbers using these URLs:

https://t.me/[phone]
https://wa.me/[phone]
https://signal.me/#p/[phone]

Zoography

Is it possible to also add a message there? Are there similar ones for video/audio calls via Telegram? – Barbabas

@androiddeveloper Not that I would know of 😕 – Zoography

Checking on the Contacts app by Google (when choosing a contact that has Telegram, and I have Telegram app), it seems that at least in the Android API it should be possible, but for some reason it doesn't work for me. Can you please see if I'm correct on this? – Barbabas

I've only looked at solutions that work cross-platform from a web-browser and not just within the ecosystem of a specific mobile OS, so I can't help you. – Zoography