Telegram, the mobile messenger of choice for over 100 million users every month, is getting some new features on both mobile and desktop in updates that are already rolling out.
The biggest update is Telegram’s push to make stickers easy to access since they’ve become part and parcel of modern day communication just like GIFs and emojis.
There will now be a Trending Stickers tab in the app’s settings section to make it easy for users to discover new stickers. What if, like some of us, you’ve amassed so many stickers over time? Rest easy. For users with over 200 sticker packs/sets, older ones that they have not used in a while will be archived to make room for new sets of stickers. The old stickers that have been archived can still be reactivated from, again, the settings section.
Here’s one new feature that will likely resonate with many: hands up if you use Telegram to send yourself stuff from photos to videos to random files. Telegram knows that users have been doing this and it is kind of “officially” acknowledging it by including a new feature: storage chat. What “storage chat” does is simply house anything you want to keep instead of sending it to yourself. One can use it by tapping their phone number from the contacts window.
Also, next time your friend or colleague adds you to some random Telegram group, you’ll be able to make the decision to accept the invitation and join or walk away in a split second thanks to another new feature: group previews. With “group previews”, a user gets an “at a glance” view of the group including some of the members and the number of members in the said group when they’ve been added to a group. With that information, it should become easy to decide whether to join a group or not.
The desktop version of Telegram is also getting a feature that rolled out to the mobile app a while back: an in-app video player.
Other new features that are part of the update and specific to Android users include a new camera interface and faster downloads for files and other media.
