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Allow Contacts to Display Dynamically by Their Chosen Name
Ransom, May 30, 2022 at 16:06, edited
OpenSuggestionGeneral

In Telegram, when you add someone to your contacts, you are prompted to decide upon a first and last name for them. Many of my contacts don't go by their first and last name; most of them use nicknames/screen names.

While you can manually input their nickname in lieu of a legal name, you can't have both.

The bigger problem is that you have to manually set a name for your contacts, because when they change their name, it remains outdated on your screen.

For example, you have a friend who's named himself Robin. If you add him from your phone contacts, his name automatically shows up as his legal name, Dick Grayson. You can then edit his name so that it goes back to his preferred name, Robin. But when he later changes his name to Nightwing, but your Telegram app still has him listed as Robin.

Please allow contact names to display by the contact's chosen name at that time, not solely by the name that you have to confirm for them.

I've attached a mockup of how this could display, changing the "Edit contact name" to just "Contact name," with the editing feature enabled by a toggle. Enabling that will allow you to override their name; disabling it will revert to the contact's default name (but still keep your custom name in memory, in case you want to reenable it later).

In summary:

  1. Add a nickname field
  2. If the nickname field is not empty, display that instead of the first and last name
  3. Add a toggle to choose between default and overriden names for each contact
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Comments6
M
Moritz Jun 2, 2022
And while we are at it, a note field should also be added, like it's suggested here:
Adding a note to a user in his profile #2557
🤙 Ni Bar Ki 😍 Su Ta Kov Jul 26, 2023
many upvotes to this. I have to manually delete people from contacts so that I can see their nickname
Ti Kishi Aug 21, 2023
This would be a very convenient feature. It's cumbersome to have to delete and re-add a contact just to see what they set. Many people use it to display status, which is impossible if they're a contact.
Saphire 🌙❄️ Jan 27, 2024
A relevant to this suggestion is also Show in-app name instead of phone number or con... #2933

And yeah, it is really frustrating when someone uses the nickname as a status indicator but you never get to see it because you added them to contacts.

Especially annoying that I either have to contend with their name being hidden by their phone number (who cares about these…?) or have their name never update and have no way to ever ever know they updated it. Seriously there’s ZERO indication someone updated their display name, at all! There isn’t even a grayed out subscript or something…
Nico Oct 24, 2025
+9001.
I've been wanting this for a while.

Many people update their public names with their affiliations, with the events/countries they're going to, or with other information which can be useful, so as of late I have not been adding anyone (other than personal contacts who aren't likely to do so) and just chat with them as non-contacts.

However, not having them as contacts has several disadvantages too:

- You don't get updates on their stories

- They don't see your phone number (and whatever other information you have set to "contacts only"), which may also make them realize that you didn't add them when they did

- You cannot make private notes on their profiles. Notes would be especially useful for business contacts, but those are usually the ones whose name updates I want to see automatically


For documentation purposes, this feature has been suggested in parallel a couple times:
- https://webappbugs.telegram.org/c/40904
- https://webappbugs.telegram.org/c/39151

Funnily, I did not find this suggestion when I initially searched about the topic (wanted to suggest it myself too)
Nico Oct 24, 2025
Does anyone know if public names for your own contacts are still accessible through API calls?

If this feature stays unimplemented, we may be able to ask the developers of some third-party Telegram client (like Forkgram, Nekogram, Telegram X...) to see if it can be done there
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