How much battery does Telegram use on a Mac?

Measured 12–14 and 21–23 August 2026 · two separate runs on the same Apple silicon MacBook · 496 windows, Telegram running in every one · reproducible with the script at the bottom

Short answer: not much, and far more than the app it sits next to. Telegram's measured battery usage on a Mac is a quarter of a watt as a matter of routine. That is small against a browser — and about thirty times what Slack costs on the same machine, over the same days, doing the same nothing.

Two runs, nine days apart, on the same machine: every column agrees. That is unusual. When we measured Slack the same way, only the median reproduced — its worst window fell from 7.4 W to 1.2 W. Telegram has no such volatility to explain away. It costs about a quarter of a watt, it costs it continuously, and it was the second most expensive app on the machine in both runs, behind Chrome.

Thirty times Slack, from one process

Both are chat clients. Both sat in the background of the same Mac over the same days. Slack's median was 0.01 W; Telegram's was 0.26 W. Before rounding, the ratio was 27-fold in the first run and 33-fold in the second — which is why this page says about thirty and not a figure to two decimal places.

Put in the units that matter, on a 60 Wh battery: Telegram takes about two and a quarter hours of sitting there to cost you one percent of a charge. Slack takes about three days.

The process counts make it stranger. Slack held a median of three processes; Telegram held one. A single process, doing whatever a messenger does when you are not looking, cost more than the other one's three put together — about thirty times more. We are not going to tell you why, because the log records what each app used, not what it was doing. There is no "it was syncing media" in the data, and a plausible story is still a story.

So should you quit it?

Probably not, and the same two runs say why. Chrome on that machine ran at 4.1 and 4.6 W — fourteen to eighteen times Telegram. Quitting Telegram to save a quarter of a watt while a browser burns four is the kind of housekeeping that feels productive and changes nothing you can measure.

What the number is good for is calibration. If you have been told chat apps are free, they are not all free: one of them took 8.7% and 8.4% of everything the apps on this Mac used, in the two runs, from the background. If your own machine has no browser at the top — some don't — an app like this becomes worth looking at.

What this does and doesn't prove

One Mac, one account. Everything here comes from a single Apple silicon MacBook, read twice. Two runs are not two machines: what the repeat buys is that the figure belongs to the app rather than to one particular week. A busier account — more groups, more media, more calls — would cost more, and we cannot say how much more without measuring it.

A quarter of a watt is small, and we are not dressing it up. Telegram is not what is emptying your battery. The finding worth carrying away is the ratio, not the verdict: two apps that look identical from the outside, sitting in the same background on the same machine, differ by a factor of about thirty. That is the whole argument for measuring instead of guessing.

Measure your own

Every figure here comes from one script over WattMate's own database:

python3 Scripts/app-energy-report.py <database> Telegram

Or watch it live: the trial ranks every app by actual watts and tells you what quitting the top one is worth — then checks its own answer two minutes later.

Related: what Slack costs · what Chrome costs · does quitting apps help at all?