Telegram Alpha

Spoilers give excitement. To use, select a photo from the media picker and tap ⋮ to hide it with spoiler.

New animation for link selection.

When you use timestamps on audio files, they're reflected on the progress bar. Like 0:10 cuts shows a cut after first 10 seconds.

New way to add new contact.

Unread counter in a message bubble represents unread topics.

You can also suggest profile photos for your contacts to put for themselves. The suggestion will be sent through a service message in the chat.

Tired of hitting send in wrong chat because of a missing profile picture? Wait no more. Now you can set a profile picture (only visible to you) for any of your contacts. To do this, go to contact's profile > ⋮ > edit contact > set photo for (contact name).

Now group admins can hide the member lists in groups with more than 100 participants. While it is enabled, only admins will be visible. No more scam admins.

Now is the time to pickup the brush and become the next Piccaso. Telegram now gives access to different types of brush, shapes, blur tool. More colors, more the fun. Give a try. P. S: the brush width selector tool has a bug that keeps it from responding to changes.

Now you can set a profile picture for your contacts and close ones while having your alt personality handling the unknown. Sounds cool? In privacy settings, now you can set your photos to be seen by nobody, yet you can set a public profile photo.

Redesigned storage menu. Elegant, beautiful and specific.

No-SIM Signup, Auto-Delete All Chats, Topics 2.0 and More https://telegram.org/blog/ultimate-privacy-topics-2-0

It has been a year since Telegram started its monetization, but the results have already exceeded our expectations. Unlike other apps, we took a privacy-conscious approach to ads: we decided that no personal data should be used for targeting and that promoted messages should only be shown in public one-to-many channels. Despite that, our ads have significantly outperformed the market and put Telegram on a steady path towards financial sustainability. Telegram Premium, which we introduced just 5 months ago, quickly surpassed 1 million subscribers and has become one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched. While it still represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue, Telegram Premium is growing steadily every day, and one day may even rival our ads. The future looks exciting. The additional monetization strategies I discussed in my previous posts are already bearing fruit, and the features we are working on now will set the foundation for further financial growth for Telegram in 2023. Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users.

The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but ended up being concentrated in the hands of a few who began to abuse their power. As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt. The solution is clear: blockchain-based projects should go back to their roots – decentralization. Cryptocurrency users should switch to trustless transactions and self-hosted wallets that don't rely on any single third party. We, developers, should steer the blockchain industry away from centralization by building fast and easy-to-use decentralized applications for the masses. Such projects are finally feasible today. It took only 5 weeks and 5 people including myself to put together Fragment – a fully decentralized auction platform. We were able to do this because Fragment is based on The Open Network, or TON – a blockchain platform that is fast and efficient enough to host popular applications (unlike Ethereum, which unfortunately remains outdated and expensive even after its recent tweaks). Fragment has been an amazing success, with 50 million USD worth of usernames sold there in less than a month. This week, Fragment will expand beyond usernames. Telegram's next step is to build a set of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and decentralized exchanges for millions of people to securely trade and store cryptocurrencies. This way we can fix the wrongs caused by the excessive centralization, which let down hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users. The time when the inefficiencies of legacy platforms justified centralization should be long gone. With technologies like TON reaching their potential, the blockchain industry should be finally able to deliver on its core mission – giving the power back to the people.