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Access Telegram without VPN from India

The Indian government has banned Telegram in India for a limited time and the ban is implemented to prevent organized cheating rackets and misinformation ahead of the NEET-UG re-examination. I don't think this is a sensible solution, because my work is affected as I did all my work related communication in Telegram.

While I have now fully moved to Signal, here's a trick to still use Telegram in India without using VPN but using the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. I tried this both on my macOS laptop and also on my Android device, and it works as expected.

On my macOS device:

I downloaded the macOS app for my device and installed it and just connected as Traffic and DNS (UDP) as you see in the screenshot here.

Cloudflare Proxy connected on Cloudflare

After that I opened the Telegram app, and it got connected and started working after a few seconds.

On my Android device:

I already had the 1.1.1.1 app installed on my Android device, but that's not available on Google Play Store anymore. However, there's a very simple way to do a manual setup on Android in their official docs that you can follow.

After the setup, just open the Telegram app, and it works as expected.

Hope this helps.

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