About tdlib-android

tdlib-android is the production-grade, community-maintained distribution of precompiled Telegram Database Library (TDLib) Android Archive (AAR) binaries across all four standard Android architectures.

The Origin & The Problem

Compiling TDLib from C++ source code is notoriously demanding. TDLib is a massive, high-performance native engine consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of modern C++. Compiling it for Android requires the complete Android NDK toolchain, CMake, OpenSSL, zlib, and at least 16 GB of RAM. On constrained developer laptops, compiling TDLib easily triggers out-of-memory errors (OOM crashes), pegs CPU cores at 100% for hours, and generates multi-gigabyte build trees.

Before tdlib-android, developers were left with frozen forks, outdated binaries missing critical Telegram security features, or manual, unversioned .so file copying that broke ABI compatibility.

tdlib-android was conceived and built on a Windows 11 machine with only 4 GB of RAM - hardware where local TDLib compilation is physically impossible. The foundational philosophy of this project is radical automation: offload the entire native compilation burden to deterministic, hardened cloud CI pipelines running on GitHub Actions. A version watchdog checks upstream TDLib every 6 hours, automatically kicks off parallel Docker matrix builds, verifies native ELF headers across all 4 ABIs, opens a pull request with exact checksums, and publishes verified AARs to Maven Central upon human review.

Architectural Pillars

• All 4 Android ABIs Shipped: Every release packages arm64-v8a (modern 64-bit devices), armeabi-v7a (legacy 32-bit devices), x86_64 (64-bit emulators), and x86 (32-bit emulators). We never drop architectures.
• Android 15+ 16 KB Page Alignment: All binaries are built with pinned NDK r27c with -Wl,-z,max-page-size=16384 flags, ensuring full compliance with Google Play's 16 KB page size requirement for Android 15 devices.
• Strict Verification Gates: Before an AAR can be packaged, CI runs verify-abi-count.sh, using readelf -h to validate the machine architecture of each binary. We never rely on superficial file sizes.
• Zero-Overhead Kotlin Coroutines Wrapper: The ktx module provides a clean 150-line reactive bridge converting TDLib's asynchronous native requests to Kotlin suspend fun send() and streaming incoming events via Flow<TdApi.Update>.

Maintainer & Identity

Licensing & Availability

The core TDLib native engine is licensed under the Boost Software License 1.0 (BSL-1.0), matching upstream Telegram. The Kotlin coroutines wrapper (ktx) is open-sourced under the Apache License 2.0. The project is completely free (₹0 cost), non-commercial, and open source.