Telegram uses the camera or microphone in the background!

Telegram can use the microphone in the background, and there is a normal reason for it. It does not use the camera in the background, even though some phones report that it does.

The microphone

If you minimise the app while making a call, recording a video, or recording a voice or video message, the microphone keeps working. Otherwise the recording would stop the moment you switched away, which would make voice messages and calls unusable.

The camera notice on Samsung and Xiaomi

Permission monitors on those devices sometimes report that Telegram requested camera access in the background. What actually happened is that the app requested information about the camera, not the camera itself. To the permission monitor the two look identical, so it reports the stronger of the two.

That request is made when you tap the attachment button, or start recording a video or a video message. If you then close the app quickly, the request can run a moment later while the app is already in the background, or be sent when the system wakes the app to show a notification. The result is a notice that reads alarmingly and describes something harmless.

You do not have to take this on faith

• The client applications are open source, so the camera handling can be read directly.
• Reproducible builds let anyone confirm that the app installed from the App Store or Google Play was built from that same published code.

Between the two, the claim that the app never uses the camera in the background is checkable rather than merely asserted, which is a stronger position than any explanation on its own.