How to use Telegram folders to organize chats and channels?

Why a chat list stops working at scale

If your Telegram chat list has grown past a few dozen entries, you have probably noticed that it stops behaving like a list and starts behaving like a feed. Every new group, channel, and bot pushes an older conversation further down, and the conversations you actually need — a work group, a client thread, a support channel — end up buried between a news channel posting constantly and three bots you rarely open. Telegram folders exist to solve exactly that problem: they let you slice one chat list into several named views, each with its own tab, so that the chats relevant to a given context are never more than one tap away.

The important mental model, and the one most people get wrong at first, is that a folder is a view, not a container. Adding a chat to a folder does not move it, does not remove it from any other folder, and does not change who can message you. It simply changes what Telegram shows you when that particular tab is selected. Once that distinction clicks, every other decision — which rules to use, when to include chats manually, when to exclude muted chats — becomes much easier to reason about. It is also why so much of the troubleshooting advice later in this article comes down to one question: is the chat genuinely absent, or are you simply not viewing it?

Feature positioning: how folders differ from Archive, Pin, and Mute

Telegram ships four tools that all look like versions of "organizing your chats," and each one behaves very differently. Sorting out the boundary between them early prevents a lot of wasted effort later.

Archive is a real move. Archiving a chat takes it out of the main list and puts it in a separate archived list. It is stateful — the chat is in exactly one place. Pin is ordering: it forces a chat to the top of whatever list it already belongs to. Mute is notifications: it silences a chat without changing where it appears. Folders are filters: a chat can appear in zero, one, or five folders simultaneously, and the same chat can be the only member of a personal folder while also being the third item in a work folder.

This is why folders are the only one of the four that scales laterally. Archive and Pin operate on individual chats and require you to keep making decisions as your chat count grows. Folders operate on rules: you define once that everything of type "Channel" belongs in a reading folder, and every channel you join from then on is sorted automatically, with no additional action from you. The trade-off is that rules are less precise than manual decisions, so most durable folder setups end up combining both — a rule-based baseline plus a handful of manual inclusions and exclusions. The two mechanisms are not competing options so much as coarse and fine adjustments on the same dial.

What folders deliberately do not do

A few expectations are worth clearing up before you build anything. Folders do not affect global search: searching from the search bar still searches your entire account, not the folder you happen to be viewing — you can verify this yourself by searching for a word that only appears in a chat outside the current folder and confirming it still shows up. Folders do not change notification behavior; notification settings remain per chat, and the mute toggle remains the only silencing mechanism. Folders also have no privacy function whatsoever — the person on the other side has no way to know that you filed their chat under "Clients," and folder configuration is not visible to anyone else unless you deliberately share a folder link. The practical consequence is reassuring: you can build a fairly aggressive folder structure without any risk of changing how your account behaves for anyone else.

Sync behavior and account limits

Chat folders are stored with your account rather than with the device, so a folder you build on your phone appears on your desktop and on the web client after a short sync. Layout and rendering differ between platforms, but the folder definitions themselves are shared. Free accounts have a ceiling on how many folders can be created, and Telegram Premium raises that ceiling and unlocks shareable folder invite links; the commonly cited figures are ten folders for free accounts and twenty with Premium, but Telegram adjusts these limits between releases, so confirm the current numbers inside your own client under Settings → Chat Folders rather than relying on any article, including this one. Multi-account users should note that folder limits and folder contents are per account, not shared across accounts in the same app — which matters if you keep a work identity and a personal identity signed in side by side.

Four folder patterns that survive contact with reality

Rather than starting from the settings screen, it helps to start from a use case. The following four patterns cover most real-world situations, and each one exercises a different part of the rule engine. Read through them, pick the one closest to your situation, and skip the rest for now — a two-folder setup that you actually use beats a nine-folder setup you abandon.

Pattern A — Work / Personal split

The classic, and the one that produces the most immediate relief. One folder contains the chats you answer as part of your job; the other contains family, friends, and hobby groups. The work folder is usually built mostly from manually added chats, because "work" is a context, not a chat type — Telegram has no way to know that one group is your standup and another is your football league, since both are simply groups.

Pattern B — High-volume reading digest

A folder made only of channels, with "exclude read chats" enabled. The result is a folder that contains exactly the channel posts you have not looked at yet, and empties itself as you read. This is the pattern that most reliably converts a drowned chat list into an inbox you can finish.

Pattern C — Project or team folder

Everything related to one initiative — groups, a bot that posts build notifications, a channel used as a document feed — collected through manual inclusion, with "exclude archived chats" left on so that closing a project automatically removes it from view. Good for people who run several parallel projects and need a fast context switch.

Pattern D — Low-noise community watcher

For large public channels and busy communities — the kind that might have a hundred thousand subscribers and post many times a day — the goal is the opposite of the digest: you want one place to drop into occasionally, without that volume interfering with anything else. The recipe is a dedicated folder plus a muted channel, described in detail further down.

Read together, the four fall into two families. Patterns A and C lean on manual inclusion because they describe a context, which no stored chat property can express. Patterns B and D lean on rules because they describe a format — channels, in both cases — which Telegram can identify on its own. Deciding which family a folder belongs to before you open the creation screen is usually enough to get the rule set right on the first attempt.

Creating your first folder: shortest paths by platform

The folder creation screen is nearly identical in structure across platforms, but the path to reach it differs. Menu labels occasionally shift between releases, so if a label below does not match exactly what you see, look for the nearest equivalent — the surrounding structure has been stable for years.

Android

Open Telegram and go to Settings → Folders → Create New Folder. A second entry point exists directly in the chat list once you already have at least one folder: the folder tabs run horizontally above the chat list, and long-pressing an existing tab usually reveals edit and add options. If you have no folders yet, that tab bar is not rendered at all, which is why the Settings route is the reliable first step. The long-press menu is also the quickest way to rename a folder whose label turned out to be too long for the tab.

iOS

Go to Settings → Chat Folders → Create New Folder. The label may read simply "Folders" depending on your build. As on Android, the tab strip above the chat list only appears after a folder exists, and once it does, the strip itself becomes the fastest way to rearrange or edit folders. The leftmost tab is always the unfiltered "All chats" view, which remains your safety net if a rule ever behaves unexpectedly.

Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux)

Open Settings → Chat Folders → Create New Folder. Desktop also renders a folder bar above the chat list, and depending on your version there may be a small "+" control at the end of that bar that jumps straight into creation. If you do not see the "+", widen the window — the bar hides secondary controls when space is tight — or fall back to the Settings route, which is always present.

Web client

The browser client mirrors the desktop path: Settings → Chat Folders. Because folder definitions live with your account, any folder created here propagates to your phone and desktop apps on the next sync. Nothing about the web client is a reduced version of folders — it is the same rule engine with a different shell around it. The flip side of that convenience is that a folder misconfigured in the browser is misconfigured everywhere, so it is worth testing a new rule on one device before you commit to it across all of them.

Case 1 walkthrough: building the Work / Personal split

Let us build Pattern A from scratch. Suppose you have roughly sixty active chats: a dozen work groups, a few one-to-one conversations with colleagues, four or five personal group chats, some family chats, and a scattering of channels and bots.

1. Open the folder creation screen using the path for your platform from the previous section.
2. Name the folder something short. Tab labels are truncated aggressively on mobile, so "Work" will render reliably while "Work — Full Time Contract Stuff" will not.
3. Leave the chat-type checkboxes unticked for now. This is the deliberate part of the workflow: you want this folder to contain only what you choose, not everything that happens to be a group.
4. Use Add chats under the included-chats section and select the work groups, colleague DMs, and any work bots.
5. Save. The folder tab appears above your chat list.
6. Repeat for a "Personal" folder with the remaining manual selections.

The reason to resist ticking chat types on the first folder is diagnostic. A folder built purely from manual inclusions behaves exactly as you expect, which gives you a trustworthy baseline. Once you have that baseline, you can start layering rules on a second folder and immediately notice when a rule catches something you did not intend. Expect the first pass to take only a few minutes and the second pass — the one where you remove the two chats you added by mistake — to take about the same.

Why manual inclusion wins for context-based folders

Context — work, family, a specific client — is not derivable from any property Telegram stores about a chat. A work group and a friend group are both groups; a colleague and a cousin are both contacts if you saved their number. Manual inclusion is the only mechanism that expresses a context accurately, and it has a useful side effect: the act of choosing each chat forces you to decide whether it genuinely belongs, which is the same reason physical filing cabinets rarely contain as much junk as download folders.

The cost is maintenance. Every new work group must be added by hand, and if you forget, it will quietly live only in "All chats." A reasonable compromise, observed to work well in practice: keep the manual folder, but on any version that supports it, add a second rule-based folder for the broad categories, and treat the manual folder as your primary working surface.

When not to build this folder

If you have fewer than roughly fifteen active chats, a Work/Personal split adds a tab you have to think about and saves you almost no scrolling. Below that threshold, pinning two or three chats produces the same benefit with none of the maintenance. Folders start paying for themselves when the cost of scanning — measured in scrolls or seconds per session — exceeds the mental cost of remembering which tab holds what.

Case 2 walkthrough: the reading digest that empties itself

Now the opposite approach — a folder defined almost entirely by rules. Suppose you follow thirty or forty channels: news, industry, a few personal blogs, and a handful of announcement channels for tools you use.

1. Create a new folder named "Read" or "Feeds."
2. Tick only the Channels chat type.
3. Enable exclude read chats.
4. Optionally enable exclude muted chats if you want to keep a separate set of channels out of circulation — but see the warning below before doing this.
5. Save and switch to the new tab.

The behavior you get is a self-emptying inbox. Channels with unread posts appear; once you read a channel's posts, it drops out of the folder. On a busy morning the folder may show twenty channels; by the evening it may show three. This is the single highest-leverage folder configuration for anyone who follows a lot of broadcast content. It also changes how the tab feels: rather than a place you browse, it becomes a queue with a finish line, and an empty tab is a signal that you are caught up rather than a sign that something is broken.

The mute interaction that surprises people

Combining "exclude read chats" and "exclude muted chats" in the same folder looks reasonable and often produces an almost permanently empty tab. The reason is that muted is a sticky state: people mute channels precisely because they never intend to keep up with them, so a folder that excludes muted channels excludes most of the content you would want in a reading queue. Empirical observation across typical setups: the two toggles are more useful in separate folders than in the same one. Keep a "Read" folder that excludes read chats, and let a separate "Archive-ish" folder hold the muted long tail.

Verification: confirming the rule does what you think

To test the rule rather than trust it, pick one channel currently visible in the digest, open it, read its unread posts, and return to the folder tab. If "exclude read chats" is active, that channel should disappear from the folder on return while remaining present under "All chats." If it does not disappear, your rule is not applied the way you assumed — check whether the channel was added manually to the included-chats list, since a manual inclusion can override the automatic exclusion behavior in ways that are easy to overlook.

Case 3 walkthrough: project folders and the archive escape hatch

Project folders are the pattern that benefits most from combining manual inclusion with one automatic rule. Consider a workflow where you run three projects in parallel, each with a group chat, a bot that posts status updates, and a channel used as a shared reference feed. Over a year, projects finish — and a finished project should stop occupying a tab.

Create a folder per project, add its chats manually, and leave exclude archived chats enabled. When a project ends, archive its group and channel. Archiving is a real move — it removes them from the main list — and because the folder excludes archived chats, the project folder becomes empty without you having to delete it. If the project restarts, unarchiving the chats makes them reappear in the folder automatically, which is a meaningful advantage over deleting and rebuilding the folder each time.

The boundary here is the number of active projects. Three to five project folders are workable; a dozen produce a tab strip that requires scrolling to navigate, at which point you have recreated the original problem one level up. When you cross roughly half a dozen parallel projects, a better structure is a single "Projects" folder holding all active project chats, sorted by recency, with the archive acting as the natural filter.

Case 4 walkthrough: handling a very large channel without drowning

Large public channels create a specific kind of pressure. A channel with, say, a hundred thousand subscribers and a posting cadence measured in dozens of messages per day will dominate any tab it lives in, because its unread counter is effectively never zero. Here the goal inverts: you do not want it in your reading digest, and you do not want it in your main list either.

1. Create a folder named something like "Low Priority" or "Browse."
2. Do not tick any chat types — this folder will hold only what you place in it.
3. Add the heavy channels manually under included chats.
4. Mute those channels individually (per-chat mute, not a folder setting).
5. Leave exclude muted chats switched off in this folder, and switch it on in your other folders.

The result is a two-sided arrangement that is genuinely elegant once configured: the heavy channels are muted, every other folder excludes muted chats, and therefore the heavy channels are invisible everywhere except in the one folder that was built to contain them. You keep access without paying the attention cost. Note that the mute itself does not affect their appearance — only the interaction between the mute state and the folder rules does — which is why both halves of this setup are required.

Trade-off: you can miss something important

Muted heavy channels can carry genuinely important announcements, and a folder you have to remember to visit is a folder you will sometimes forget. The mitigation is a deliberate habit rather than a setting: schedule a specific moment — end of day, or a fixed weekday slot — to open the low-priority folder. An alternative that reduces the risk is to leave the channel unmuted but rely on the folder structure alone to contain it, accepting that the unread badge on the folder tab will always show a number. Neither approach is objectively correct; the choice depends on whether you are more bothered by a permanent badge or by the chance of missing an announcement.

The rule engine: how inclusions and exclusions actually combine

Folder rules are easier to trust when you have an explicit model of how they resolve. The following is a working model derived from observed behavior rather than an official specification, and it is worth verifying against your own client using the steps below.

Think of a chat's membership in a folder as the result of three gates applied in order. First, an inclusion gate: does the chat match a ticked chat type, or was it manually added under included chats? If neither, the chat is out. Second, an exclusion gate: was the chat manually placed under excluded chats? If yes, it is out regardless of anything else. Third, the state filters: does the chat match an active exclusion such as "read," "muted," or "archived"? If yes, it is out — with the caveat that a manual inclusion may, in some configurations, take precedence. That last clause is deliberately hedged because it is the part that most often surprises people, and it is the reason the next test exists.

Reproducible check for the precedence question

To determine how your build resolves manual inclusion versus a state filter, run this three-step test. Create a scratch folder, tick only "Channels," and enable "exclude read chats." Manually add one specific channel under included chats. Switch to the folder and note whether that channel appears while fully read. Then read a new post in a different channel that was included only by the type rule, and observe whether it drops out. If both channels behave differently, your build treats manual inclusion as higher precedence than the read filter; if they behave identically, it does not. The test takes under a minute and gives you a definitive answer for the client you actually use, which is more reliable than any general statement.

The empty-folder error and how to avoid it

A folder made only of exclusion rules has nothing to include, and Telegram will generally refuse to save it or will report that the folder contains no chats. This is not a bug; it is the inclusion gate working correctly. If your mental model is "a folder of everything except X," the honest implementation is to tick the chat types that cover most of your list and then exclude the specific chats you do not want, rather than trying to express the idea negatively. In practice, the cleanest way to build an "everything except work" folder is to tick all chat types and manually exclude the work chats — accepting that new work chats will need excluding later.

Managing folders after they exist: rename, reorder, share, delete

Folder upkeep matters more than folder creation, because a folder structure that was sensible six months ago can quietly become a source of friction. Renaming and reordering are the two operations you will use most.

Renaming is available from the same settings screen used to create the folder — open the folder in the list and edit its name. Reordering is done by dragging the folder entries in that list, or in some clients by dragging the tabs themselves. Order is not cosmetic: it determines how far you have to swipe or click to reach each tab, so the folder you open most should sit closest to the default "All chats" position. Reordering is also the single cheapest fix for folder sprawl, because it lets you keep a rarely used folder without it consuming prime tab-strip real estate.

Sharing works through a folder invite link, a mechanism tied to Telegram Premium on the creation side; joining a shared folder is available more broadly. When someone opens your folder link, they get a copy of the folder and its rules applied to their chats — the folder definition travels, the chat memberships do not, because the recipient does not have your chats. This makes folder links an excellent way to standardize a team's chat organization without standardizing anything about their actual conversations. Verify the current availability in your client, since Premium feature gating has shifted across releases.

Deleting a folder removes the view and nothing else. No chat is archived, muted, unread, or otherwise altered by deleting the folder that referenced it. This is the clearest demonstration of the view-versus-container distinction, and it is worth doing once deliberately on a scratch folder just to internalize the behavior.

Platform differences worth knowing before you build

Folders are conceptually identical everywhere, but the shells differ in ways that affect daily use.

Two practical consequences follow. First, name folders for the narrowest display you use — a name that reads well on a wide desktop window may become an unreadable stub on a phone. Two to three short words is a safe ceiling. Second, because unread badges are per folder, the same unread message can be counted in more than one folder. That is expected behavior for a chat that matches multiple folders, and it means the total across tabs is not a meaningful "total unread" figure.

Common mistakes, and the recovery path for each

Most folder frustration traces back to a handful of recurring misreadings. Each of these has a specific recovery.

• Expecting a folder to move chats. Symptom: a chat still appears in the main list after being added to a folder. Recovery: nothing to fix — this is correct behavior. Use Archive if you want removal, or simply work from the folder tab and ignore the main list.
• Creating a folder with only exclusions. Symptom: the folder will not save, or saves with no contents. Recovery: tick at least one chat type, then exclude specific chats.
• Using chat types for context-based folders. Symptom: unrelated groups keep appearing in your "Work" folder. Recovery: untick all chat types and switch to manual inclusion.
• Over-fragmenting. Symptom: you scroll the tab strip to find things. Recovery: merge folders that share a purpose, and reorder so the two or three you use most are leftmost.
• Forgetting the archived filter. Symptom: old projects still occupy a tab. Recovery: enable "exclude archived chats" and archive the finished work.
• Assuming folders are private to you in some way that matters. Symptom: none — but the expectation is wrong. Recovery: understand that folders are purely a local view, with the sole exception of a folder link you explicitly share.
• Believing deleting a folder deletes chats. Symptom: hesitation before cleanup. Recovery: delete the folder and confirm under "All chats" that every chat remains.

Notice that most of these are expectation errors rather than configuration errors. Only the second and third entries describe something the software actually refuses to do; the rest are cases where the feature worked exactly as designed and the mental model was off by one step. That asymmetry is worth keeping in mind when you are deciding whether to change a setting or change your assumption.

Troubleshooting: symptom, cause, verification, fix

The following is organized so that you can start from an observed symptom rather than from a setting, which is how problems actually show up.

Folder tab is missing entirely

Likely cause: no folders have been created yet, so the client does not render the strip. Verification: open Settings and confirm the folders list is empty. Fix: create one folder; the strip appears immediately. On desktop, also check whether the window is wide enough to render the folder bar.

A chat refuses to appear in a folder

Likely cause: the chat is being caught by a state filter — it is read, muted, or archived while the corresponding exclusion is enabled. Verification: check the chat's mute state and archive state directly; if it is muted and "exclude muted chats" is on, that is the answer. Fix: either unmute the chat, disable the mute exclusion, or add the chat manually to the included list and re-check using the precedence test described earlier.

The same chat appears in several folders

Likely cause: this is intended behavior — folders are views, and a chat matching the rules of multiple folders appears in all of them. Verification: inspect each folder's rule set; you will usually find overlapping chat-type ticks or repeated manual inclusions. Fix: if the duplication is unwanted, narrow the type ticks, or use the excluded-chats list of the folder that should not contain it.

Folder looks empty but channels are clearly unread

Likely cause: a mismatch between what the folder includes and what the client considers unread; on some builds, opening a chat marks it read even if you only glanced at it. Verification: check the unread counters on the "All chats" tab and compare with folder membership. Fix: if you rely on a digest folder, avoid opening it just to browse — use the tab, read deliberately, and accept that the folder will empty.

Folders differ between phone and desktop

Likely cause: sync lag, or two separate accounts signed in on different devices. Verification: confirm the account identity on each device, then check whether folder names match. Fix: wait for sync; if the folders genuinely differ, you are looking at two accounts, and each has its own folder set and its own folder-count limit.

Folders and automation: what bots can and cannot do

Bots interact with folders indirectly, and it is worth being precise about the boundary. A bot cannot read your folder configuration, cannot create folders on your account, and cannot move chats between folders — those operations are account-level settings, not part of the bot API surface. What bots do produce is traffic: status messages, alerts, digest posts, file dumps. Folders are the mechanism that keeps that traffic from contaminating your human conversations.

A workable pattern, common among people who run several automations: create a dedicated group or channel for each automation's output, mute it, and place it in a single "Automation" folder with mute exclusion switched off. Because every other folder excludes muted chats, the automation output is confined to one tab. This works with any bot or integration that can post into a chat you control — the folder layer is agnostic to which bot produced the message.

Before and after: measuring whether your folders actually help

The claim that folders improve chat organization is easy to state and hard to falsify without numbers. Rather than quoting generic figures, measure your own before and after using counts that you control. The table below is a worksheet — fill in the right-hand column yourself after a week of use, and treat any difference as meaningful only if you can reproduce it.

Qualitatively, the consistent pattern is that folders reduce the number of chats you scan per session, because a well-built folder contains only the chats relevant to the current context. The mechanism is straightforward: scanning is proportional to the number of visible items, and a folder with eight members is scanned faster than a list with eighty, regardless of device. What folds and devices vary is how much faster — a phone with a short screen benefits more from a short folder than a large desktop window does, because the desktop was already showing most of the list at once.

Applicable and non-applicable scenarios

Folders are not universally the right answer, and the criteria for deciding are reasonably concrete.

The identity-separation row deserves emphasis, because it is the most consequential mistake on this list. If you need two contexts that must not leak into each other, folders will not do it — every chat remains reachable from "All chats," search spans the whole account, and a folder link never exposes anything but the definition. Separate accounts are the mechanism for that requirement.

Best practices checklist

Treat these as decision rules rather than a to-do list. Each one exists to prevent a specific failure mode described earlier.

1. Start with two folders, not seven. Add more only when you can name the specific chat that keeps ending up in the wrong one.
2. Use manual inclusion for context (work, family, a client) and chat types for format (channels, bots, groups). Mixing the two purposes is the most common design error.
3. Name folders at two to three short words so labels survive mobile truncation.
4. Put the folder you open most close to "All chats" in the tab order; reorder rather than delete when a folder becomes rare.
5. Enable "exclude archived chats" on project folders so finishing work automatically removes it from view.
6. Keep "exclude read chats" in exactly one folder — the reading digest — and nowhere else.
7. Keep "exclude muted chats" off in the single folder that houses your muted high-volume channels, and on everywhere else.
8. Never treat a folder as a privacy boundary; use separate accounts when separation is a real requirement.
9. After adding a rule, run the 60-second precedence test on one chat before trusting the folder for daily use.
10. Review the structure every few months; a folder set that matched your work six months ago may now be describing a job you no longer have.

If the list feels long, note that items three through seven describe a single coherent configuration — a small, well-named set of folders in which exactly one excludes read chats and exactly one tolerates muted chats. Everything else is about resisting the urge to expand. The most common way a working folder setup degrades is not a wrong rule but an extra folder added for a situation that turned out to be temporary.

Verification and observation methods

Because Telegram's folder rules are behavioral rather than documented in detail, the practical approach is to treat each configuration as a hypothesis and test it. Three checks cover nearly everything you will need.

Check 1 — Membership test. Add a chat to a folder, then switch to "All chats" and confirm the chat is still there. Expected result: present in both. If it is missing from "All chats," you have archived it rather than folderized it.

Check 2 — State filter test. With "exclude read chats" enabled, read a matching chat's unread messages and return to the folder tab. Expected result: the chat disappears from the folder. Record how long the change takes to appear; on slower devices a brief delay is normal.

Check 3 — Mute interaction test. Mute a chat that sits in a folder with "exclude muted chats" enabled, then reopen the folder. Expected result: the chat is no longer listed. If it remains, the chat was probably added manually, which brings you back to the precedence question and the test described earlier.

Run these once when you build a folder and again after any client update that changes settings layout. Folder behavior has been stable across recent releases, but client updates occasionally reorganize where options live, and it is cheaper to re-verify than to debug a wrong assumption later.

Where to go from here

The durable takeaway is that Telegram folders are filters that let one chat list behave like several, and that their value comes from rules you set once rather than decisions you repeat daily. Build the first folder from manual inclusions so you have a trustworthy baseline, then add one rule-based folder — most likely a channel digest that excludes read chats — because that is where the leverage is highest relative to the effort. Keep the total small, order the tabs by how often you actually use them, and re-verify with the three checks whenever you change a rule or notice behavior that contradicts your expectations.

A practical next step, if you want to do one thing after reading this: open the folder creation screen on the device you use most, create a folder named "Read," tick only Channels, enable "exclude read chats," and use it for a week while counting the four worksheet measures above. That single folder will tell you more about whether this feature fits your habits than any broader reorganization attempt, and it costs about a minute to build.

Finally, treat everything here as version-dependent. Menu labels, folder count limits, and Premium gating have all shifted across releases, and the settings screen is the authoritative source for the build you are running. When an article and your client disagree, your client wins — and the verification steps described above are how you settle the question in under a minute.