Unblock Telegram and sign in without a second device

Telegram answers the same launch link from 2 different places, Web K, its original web client, and Web A, a newer and separate codebase. Neither one talks to Telegram directly: your browser reaches TrickyBird’s own address, which fetches the page, rewrites its HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so every link and script leads back through that same address, and streams the result into your tab. A script installed there keeps whatever either client loads afterwards on TrickyBird’s address too, instead of letting it reach out to Telegram.

The part that usually fails first on a messenger is the live connection, and here it holds. Both clients speak Telegram’s own protocol, MTProto, over a WebSocket that stays open as long as the tab does, and TrickyBird tunnels that connection the same way it tunnels the page. That is why a chat updates in place rather than needing a reload; the socket carrying it never left the proxy.

Most messenger web clients default to scanning a QR code from a phone that already has the account open, which assumes you own a second device and have the app on it. Telegram keeps that path too, and the QR code is the first thing you see by default on Web K and on Web A, but right beside it, not buried in a settings menu, is “Log in by phone number”. Click it and a country-code and number form opens, the same form Telegram shows on a direct visit.

An account signed out everywhere else finishes that path with a code sent by SMS to the number you typed, not with a scan from another screen. No second device comes into it. We watched the form accept a country code and a number, on Web K and on Web A. We did not carry a real number through to a delivered code, because that step needs a real Telegram account and a real phone, and neither exists in the environment we tested from. Take the form as reachable and working through the proxy, and the SMS delivery itself as Telegram’s own part of the process, whether you reach the page through TrickyBird or directly.

Network filters often catch messengers as a category, along with chat and social apps, rather than singling Telegram out. At country level the picture is more precise: Telegram is blocked in Iran, in Pakistan, and in mainland China since July 2015, and it was blocked nationally in Russia from April 2018 until June 2020, when that ban was lifted.

Here is the line we can draw today: both clients load, the phone-number form accepts input on each, and the WebSocket carrying Telegram’s own protocol runs through the proxy on both. We stopped at the door of a real account, because finishing the sign-in needs a real phone number this setup does not have. Past that door we claim nothing: chats, contacts, and message delivery are Telegram’s own experience once you are signed in, untouched by anything TrickyBird changes on the page before then.

Telegram’s address stays out of your URL bar throughout, on the sign-in screen and after it, because TrickyBird is what connects to Telegram on your behalf. To run the service and curb abuse, TrickyBird keeps a shortened form of your IP address and the destination hostname for at most 48 hours, with no account of its own for that to attach to.