Hilary Giorgi

Telegram’s New Features are Here

Telegram rolls out a massive functionality update. It includes 8 brand-new features, but some of them are Android exclusives.

Payments 2.0

Telegram is bringing a whole caboodle of new features. Among them, you’ll see improved functionality, sleek animations, more multimedia features, and so on.

The main attraction in this carnival is the feature dubbed Payments 2.0. This means that you can pay for goods/services — from a strawberry vape liquid to a pack of exclusive stickers — right in the chat. You’ll also be able to tip your merchant.

Payments 2.0 is compatible with several e-money services. So, not only you’ll be able to browse an e-store in TG, but also order something cool the moment you see it: a pair of sneakers, chicken tikka masala, and so forth. No need to open multiple windows anymore.

Interestingly, Telegram claims that they take $0 commission for every transaction. Furthermore, TG doesn’t collect, record and sell info on purchases that come through it.

Extended audio

Then, we have new voice chat features. Voice conferences and convos are a trend now. So, Telegram has a few surprises for those who enjoy it.

Apart from organizing group calls, you can also set a countdown. It’s a clock ticking in the reversed way, which shows how much time is left until a certain event takes place: an audio-party, conference, family get together, a gaming team’s briefing, and so on.

You can schedule such a voice chat if you want. Go to the channel where your group of people dwells and select Start Voice Chat —> Schedule Voice Chat. The whole gang will be notified.

Multimedia

You can fiddle with media files on a whole new level now. First, you don’t need to tap a photo to zoom it in. You can zoom-pinch it right in the chat to explore a detail that attracted your attention.

You can also rewind/fast-forward videos differently now. Simply tap and hold on the left or right to make it go faster in one of the directions. And the classic double-tap that skips 10 seconds hasn’t disappeared, by the way.

Specially for Android

Maybe it’s not much, but TG prepared new enter/exit animations exclusively for the Android crowd. They are a bit smoother with an elusive motion in the background. However, it remains to be seen how these fancy animations affect the phone battery.

You can test the refurbished app right now. There are also two web clients: Web K and Web Z, which are basically two separate beta versions of a soon-to-come TG webapp.