After updating Telegram for Android, new topics in bot chats appear empty.
With topics enabled in a bot chat, sending or forwarding a message via “New Thread / New Chat” on Android creates a new topic. However, neither the message nor the bot’s reply is visible when opening that topic in either the Android client or the macOS client.
Both messages are visible under “New Thread / New Chat” in both clients and appear to be linked to the created topic. However, sending another message inside that topic starts a separate bot context instead of continuing the original conversation.
Expected behavior: the initial message and the bot’s reply should appear inside the created topic, and further messages should continue the same conversation.
This worked before the Android update. Creating a topic by sending a message via “New Chat” in the macOS client still works correctly.
This makes forwarding messages to bots with topics enabled unusable on Android: the original conversation cannot be continued.
Steps to reproduce
Open a bot chat with topics enabled in Telegram for Android.
Select “New Thread / New Chat”.
Send a message and wait for the bot to reply.
Open the newly created topic. Neither your message nor the bot’s reply is visible.
Open the same topic in Telegram for macOS. Both messages are missing there too.
Go back to “New Thread / New Chat” in either client. Your message and the bot’s reply are visible there and appear to be linked to the created topic.
Send another message inside the empty topic. The bot treats it as a new conversation instead of continuing the original one.
The issue also occurs when forwarding a message to the bot into a new topic from Android.
For comparison, repeat steps 1–4 using Telegram for macOS to start the conversation: the message appears in the newly created topic correctly.
In BotForumHelper.beforeSendingFinalRequest(), when a message is sent/forwarded into "New Chat" of a bot with Threaded mode, the client creates the topic via messages.createForumTopic and then binds the message with only reply_to_msg_id = topicId, without setting top_msg_id (the thread id). Every other send path in the app (SendMessagesHelper.createReplyInput, the group-forum path, the forwardMessages branch in the same method) sets both fields. With top_msg_id missing, the server treats the message as a plain reply in the currently open context: the new topic stays empty on all clients, the bot reply lands in "New Chat", and later messages inside the topic start a new bot conversation — exactly the symptoms described here on 13.0.0 (71589).
The PR also fixes a secondary bug: when topic creation fails, the message was still bound to topicId = -1.
In BotForumHelper.beforeSendingFinalRequest(), when a message is sent/forwarded into "New Chat" of a bot with Threaded mode, the client creates the topic via messages.createForumTopic and then binds the message with only reply_to_msg_id = topicId, without setting top_msg_id (the thread id). Every other send path in the app (SendMessagesHelper.createReplyInput, the group-forum path, the forwardMessages branch in the same method) sets both fields. With top_msg_id missing, the server treats the message as a plain reply in the currently open context: the new topic stays empty on all clients, the bot reply lands in "New Chat", and later messages inside the topic start a new bot conversation — exactly the symptoms described here on 13.0.0 (71589).
The PR also fixes a secondary bug: when topic creation fails, the message was still bound to topicId = -1.
the problem persists