Building a Telegram Mini App: My battle with iOS WebKit and Telegram Stars API

Hi PH, I'm Alex, a solo Java dev from Belarus.

I'm currently preparing to launch my finance tracker, Kopilo, and I thought building a Telegram Mini App would be the easy route. The idea was simple: build where users already spend their time so they don't have to download yet another app.

That was naive. TMA development has its own dark corners:

• The iOS WebKit Bug: A random black screen issue on iOS ate two full days of my life.

• The Payment API Quirks: To get Telegram Stars working, I had to anonymously override a validate() method in a Java library because the library absolutely refused to accept an empty provider token—even though Telegram's own API spec requires it for Stars. There's a comment in my codebase about this hack that I will probably take to my grave.

• AI Streaming: I ended up using Gemini's native SSE API directly without wrappers because every abstraction library I tried added some parameter that broke the stream.

To all the solo makers and dev teams here: What is the ugliest hack you've ever had to leave in your codebase just to make a third-party API work? Would love to hear your war stories so I feel a little less alone!