Guess which feature is Premium-only?
Telegram is undoubtedly one of the most widely used instant encrypted messaging applications, which isn’t an easy feat considering the competition. Although the developers have offered the app for free since its inception, the company took the step of launching a paid subscription service in June this year. Just as Telegram was obsessed with new features going out on a timely basis before, Telegram Premium keeps the pace up, but saves the best tidbits for its subscribers. In continuing this tradition, Telegram has now announced yet another update that includes some handy new features for its free and Premium subscribers.
Starting with Premium users, Telegram will now offer transcriptions of video messages. This feature was previously limited to just voice messages and is now effectively expanding to videos as well. It’s a useful feature to have, particularly if you’re in a situation where you can’t listen closely to what was sent to you. There are free ways of getting transcriptions for everything you do on your phone, but Premium is offering a handy, convenient, fit-for-purpose tool here.
Next up is Topics, a new addition that helps to alleviate common pain points of groups with a lot of members. Telegram says groups that have over 200 members can toggle Topics to set aside a portion of the group for a topic you’re interested in.
Since it functions as an individual chat within the group, the topic can leverage all the core chat features, including pinned messages, bots, shared media, polls, etc. This feature is accessible to all, even if they’re on the free version of the app. Telegram says it is planning to add “a different set of tools” for smaller groups before the end of the year.
The developers are also diving into “collectible usernames,” enabling users to assign unique names to their accounts and chats. These collectible usernames are proclaimed to be secured by the TON blockchain network. There’s always a market for vanity usernames, especially when it comes to smaller groups.
There are new emoji packs in the offing too, several days after Halloween, including 12 new packs created by the design team at Telegram.
Android users can now expect a consistent resizing of the text when the feature is enabled through Chat Settings. Text resizing now applies across the board including reply headers and previews.
Lastly, Telegram is getting a few minor design changes, such as animated placeholders while you wait for messages to load and a new animation while swiping left to reply within a chat.
The developer caps off its announcement with an apology for the delay in rolling out this update, placing the blame squarely on Apple for taking two weeks to review the new update. There’s even a post by Telegram founder Pavel Durov explaining the whole ordeal.
You can get these updates with Telegram v9.1.1 from the Play Store or APK Mirror.
