BotNews

Introducing Payments for Digital Goods and Services With the upcoming Telegram update, your bots and mini apps will be able to sell digital goods and services. To allow for this change in compliance with third-party store terms, we are rolling out a new in-app currency, Telegram Stars. Users will soon be able to acquire Stars from Telegram using standard Apple and Google in-app purchases and then use them to buy digital goods and services from you. All payments for digital goods and services have to be carried out exclusively in Telegram Stars. If digital goods and services can be purchased for your bot or mini app on other platforms, like your external website, the same goods and services must also be available for purchase with Telegram Stars, in compliance with Apple Review Guideline 3.1.3(b). To accept payments for digital goods and services, starting with Bot API 7.4, you can use the sendInvoice or createInvoiceLink methods with the currency field set to "XTR" and the provider_token field left empty. To refund payments, you can use the refundStarPayment method. 💎 Developers will be able to withdraw Telegram Stars using the TON blockchain. ⚠️ Payments for physical goods and services are unaffected by this change and can continue operating as usual. Along with these changes, Bot API 7.4 adds even more improvements for all bots, like: • Support for visual effects, which bots can attach to messages via the new message_effect_id parameter. • Support for expandable blockquote text entities. • Captions that can be shown above the respective media via the new show_caption_above_media parameter. • And more, see the full changelog for details.

Bot API 7.3 Telegram Business • Messages sent on behalf of a business account now support url, login_url, and callback_game inline buttons. Live Locations • Added support for live locations that can be edited indefinitely. • Bots can now edit live periods via the new live_period parameter. General • Added support for custom emoji in Polls. • Added the field via_join_request to ChatMemberUpdated, for users whose join request was approved. • Bots can now detect service messages about background changes in chats via the new chat_background_set field in Message. • And more, see the full changelog for details: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api-changelog#may-6-2024 Note: The method getChat now returns the new ChatFullInfo class, which has been split out from Chat.