Messaging giant Telegram is celebrating its 13th anniversary with a significant platform update, introducing a suite of new features designed to enhance user interaction, group management, and digital gifting. This update marks another milestone in Telegram's rapid evolution, bringing more practical tools for everyday conversations and expanding capabilities for developers.
Custom Welcome Messages and Interactive Buttons
One of the key additions allows group and channel owners to create custom welcome messages. These messages are exclusively visible to new members, effectively preventing introductory clutter in the main chat feed. Owners can include multiple messages, rich media, and detailed formatting, such as tables and inline media, by accessing the chat profile and navigating to Edit > Welcome Message.
Developers also gain powerful new tools with the introduction of multiple interactive buttons within messages. When combined with ephemeral messages, this feature opens up possibilities for engaging experiences like surveys, games, quizzes, horoscopes, and even in-chat product browsing or ordering. These interactive elements function seamlessly in both groups and channels, facilitating simultaneous interaction among multiple users. Building automated flows using these buttons will require coding.
Inline Files and Signed Digital Gifts
The rich-text editor has been upgraded to support the embedding of documents, files, and music directly within text. Users can now attach inline files with just two taps. The enhanced editor becomes accessible after typing more than three lines and tapping the expand icon.
To ensure a smooth experience for all users, Telegram has also implemented a placeholder for outdated app versions that cannot display the new features. This placeholder includes a button prompting users to download the latest version, which can be enabled via Play Store on Android or App Store settings on iOS.
For those purchasing gifts through Telegram's Marketplace using Stars, a new personalization option has been added. Users can now include a signature and a comment with their digital gifts. This feature is accessible by opening a user's profile, selecting 'Send a Gift', and applying the 'Collectible' filter.
A Year of Rapid Innovation
Telegram highlights its consistent commitment to innovation, noting that it has released 12 major updates over the past year, introducing more than 55 new features. These significant additions have included rich-text formatting, Liquid Glass on iOS, a redesign for Android, advanced chat automation, an expanded sticker and emoji search with over 100 million options, smartwatch support, AI bots, Mighty Polls, member tags, community features, passkey integration, and music on profiles.