In this article
A mini app can send you one of Telegram's own gifts — the animated kind that sits on a profile — paid for out of the app's own balance, as a prize for winning something or reaching a milestone.
It is the rare in-game reward that exists outside the game. That is the appeal, and it is also the part people misread.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Say who pays for a gift an app sends you.
- check_circle Know who can see it afterwards.
- check_circle Choose between keeping it and converting it.
- check_circle Recognise the version of this that is a scam.
The gift arrives as a message from the bot and settles onto the profile behind it.
military_tech A trophy that leaves the game
Almost everything won inside a game stays inside it. The badge, the rank, the rare item — all of it lives in one company's database and means nothing anywhere else, which is why nobody has ever been impressed by a screenshot of a leaderboard.
A gift is different in one specific way: it lands on your Telegram profile, where people who have never heard of the game will see it. The app bought something real with its own balance and handed it over, and what you are holding afterwards is an ordinary Telegram gift rather than a game asset that happens to look like one.
Which is worth keeping in proportion. It is a nice thing to receive and a sensible way for a developer to thank people who stayed. It is not evidence about the game, and a profile covered in them says a great deal about how much has been spent nearby and almost nothing about whether any of it was a good idea.
A game you play sends you a gift for finishing a season. What did it cost you?
The developer pays, out of the Stars their app has earned. Receiving costs nothing and requires nothing of you, which is exactly why an app that asks you to pay something in order to claim a prize is not doing this — it is running the oldest scam there is with newer scenery.
Where does it end up?
It goes onto the gifts section of your ordinary Telegram profile, alongside anything a person has sent you, and the message the app attached is readable there too. That is the whole point of the feature and the thing to decide about: a stranger opening your profile learns that you play that game and that somebody spent money on you.
You would rather have the value than the ornament. What are your options?
A gift received from a mini app behaves like any other: you can leave it off your profile, or convert it into Stars to spend elsewhere in Telegram. Converting returns less than the gift cost rather than the full amount, so the choice is a real one — and the app is not told which way you went.
A message says you have won a gift and links you to a page to claim it. What is happening?
A gift that exists is already in your profile before you hear about it, because sending one is a single action by the app. Anything that routes you to a page, asks you to connect a wallet, to enter a code, or to pay a fee has inverted the whole transaction — and a badge beside the name proves only that somebody paid for a subscription.
task_alt
campaign If you are the one giving them out
This is a good way to thank the small number of people who did something real — the moderator who kept order for a year, the tester who found the thing nobody else did, the player who won the tournament you ran. It is a poor way to run a promotion, because a prize that reaches ten thousand people stops being recognition and becomes a rounding error on your costs.
The part that makes it land is the message attached to it. A gift with "Season 4 winner" on it explains itself to everybody who opens that profile for the next several years. A gift with nothing written on it is an anonymous ornament that could have come from anywhere, and you will have paid the same for it.
One honest caution: because gifts can be converted, handing them out is closer to handing out money than to handing out medals. That is fine when it is meant as a thank-you and awkward when it is meant as a rank, and it is worth deciding which one you are doing before the first one goes out.
This page is one thing an app can do with the Stars it has earned. The curriculum step is the economy around it: how Stars enter, what they can buy, how a developer's balance works, and where the real money sits at either end.
At a glance
- 1Gifts from apps
Some mini apps send gifts paid by the developer.
- 2Public on profile
Received gifts can show on your profile.
- 3Never pay to receive
Real gifts arrive; requests for fees are scams.
Updated
