Building tdlib-android - TDLib Without the Compile

Every option for TDLib on Android, as of 2026: up9cloud's fork is frozen at 1.8.52 and needs a GitHub token for raw .so files. TGX-Android's is explicitly not for external use. tdlibx/td-ktx was archived in 2024. And building it yourself means hours of NDK C++ compilation that runs out of memory and freezes your machine halfway through.

I built tdlib-android to kill that last option.

What it is

The only community-maintained TDLib distribution for Android, auto-updated, with zero build steps. One Gradle line pulls in prebuilt AARs for all 4 ABIs — arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, x86_64, x86. No compiling from source, no GitHub token, no .so wrangling. There's also an optional Kotlin Coroutines + Flow wrapper.

The setup is two lines:

implementation("io.github.tdlib-android:core:0.1.0")
implementation("io.github.tdlib-android:ktx:0.1.0")

The 4GB problem

I built this on a Windows 11 machine with 4GB of RAM. Building TDLib locally there is an absolute nightmare — the C++ compiler runs out of memory, crashes halfway, takes hours, and freezes the whole machine.

So I shifted 100% of the heavy lifting to the cloud. GitHub Actions handles the C++ compilation for all 4 ABIs on high-memory runners. FOSS developers with weak hardware get the binaries without the hardware bottleneck.

Tested

Realme GT 7, Dimensity 9400e, Android 16 (API 36). Works with any Telegram client, bot UI, or MTProto-based app.

What's next

Newer TDLib versions as Telegram moves the API. Wider ABI testing. The ktx wrapper could use more operators — sendMessage flows, update handling — before it's worth calling stable.

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4 ABIs. 1 Gradle line. 0 build steps. MIT licensed.