How to change the owner of a Telegram bot (2020 update)

How to transfer a Telegram bot in 2020.

Motivation

I have the bot that we’ve been developing with my friend last year. Since I decided to continue its development by myself with further paid acquisition and (I hope) monetization, I really want to have full control of the bot in BotFather. So I decided to look for a solution: How can I transfer the bot ownership to my account?

Solution

There is no official Telegram service that can change the Telegram bot owner right now, but according to the official Bot Support (see screenshot) this feature might be implemented in the future.

The only way to transfer the bot ownership right now is to delete the bot in BotFather and create again. The downside of this approach is you will lose all your users.

This is your bot after a deletion via BotFather

The workaround is to broadcast a message that “this bot will become a Deleted Account soon, please subscribe to our channel ***”. In that case, you can continue to communicate with your userbase after a deletion.

Since the link to the bot before deletion and after will be the same — all your shared links and referrals would work. I suggest to broadcast the message with your bot link before the deletion to allow you users to go to a new bot with one click.

I can’t wait for Telegram Messenger to implement this feature soon. It looks like a really easy one but very useful.

Thanks for reading!
Daniil Okhlopkov
okhlopkov.com