Nanogram, a new app from the creator of the FlickType swipe keyboard app for watchOS, lets you use Telegram on Apple Watch even when you don’t have your iPhone on you.
Nanogram lets you use Telegram on Apple Watch without iPhone
The software brings the full Telegram experience to your Apple Watch.
The Telegram messaging app offers an Apple Watch app for sending and receiving messages from your wrist, but it’s slow as hell and requires Telegram running on your iPhone to function.
Enter Nanogram, a fast Telegram client, Nanogram allows you to see all your Telegram messages and notifications, as well as send messages, without having your iPhone around. The app was born out of Kosta’s frustration with Telegram’s slow performance on Apple Watch “and how it just doesn’t work at all when I don’t have my phone nearby.”
Nanogram was created by Kosta Eleftheriou, a developer behind the FlickType app which makes typing messages on your Apple Watch as simple as a flick. Kosta has also made it his mission to expose various App Store scams on social media.
Also, Nanogram supports the excellent FlickType swipe keyboard for even faster replies on the go (you still have the choice of standard input methods like scribble and dictation).
Why watchOS messaging apps suck
Kosta explains what inspired him to create Nanogram:
I’ve been personally frustrated by how painfully slow Telegram is on my Apple Watch, and how it just doesn’t work at all when I don’t have my phone nearby. This is primarily because Apple’s API is plain unusable. Apple doesn’t make it easy to develop messaging apps for the watch. It’s been really bad.
And this:
In fact, making any app for the watch is still an incredibly poor and bug-ridden experience, even impossible at times. So it’s fascinating to realize that Telegram has grown to half a billion users with an Apple Watch app that doesn’t even provide basic and reliable messaging functionality to this day—mostly due to Apple’s broken or non-existent APIs.
Nanogram does not collect any information, Kosta tells us, and connects with the Telegram service directly using the official Telegram SDK.
Nanogram is available on App Store as a free download.
The app requires Apple Watch Series 3 or later, running watchOS 7 or later.