How Telegram Mini Apps Reduced Our Onboarding from 2 Minutes to 10 Seconds
I thought building my new game would be hard.
I was wrong.
The hard part was not the game logic or the animations.
The hard part was everything before the game started.
I spent too much time trying to optimize the gameplay.
I should have optimized the time between a user saying "Let's play" and actually playing.
Traditional mobile games have too many steps:
- Receive a link
- Open the App Store
- Download the app
- Install the app
- Create an account
- Verify an email
- Sign in
- Find a room
- Start playing
Each step makes people quit. Onboarding feels like work.
I wanted a flow that looked like this:
- Receive a link
- Tap
- Play
Telegram Mini Apps solved this problem.
Users already have Telegram. They have an identity, a profile, and a social graph.
Instead of making new accounts, we use the one they have.
Our new flow:
- Receive a link
- Open Telegram
- Start playing
There is no installation. There is no registration. There are no passwords.
New users join a game in 5 to 10 seconds.
I stopped tracking FPS or API latency as my main metric.
I started tracking "Time to first game."
People do not care about your technology. They care about how fast they reach value.
The best onboarding is the one users do not notice.
Building on Telegram has its own challenges:
- Working in a mobile WebView
- Optimizing animations for mobile
- Handling deep links
- Managing state
- Designing for small screens
These trade-offs are worth it to remove friction.
I used to think great products needed more features.
Now I know great products win by removing obstacles.
Every extra screen or password is a chance for a user to leave.
Now I ask a different question when I build:
"What can I remove before users get value?"
Reducing onboarding from two minutes to ten seconds was my best product decision.