Innovations in Telegram for 2019

The year 2019 is coming to an end, during which Telegram has received many updates. After interviewing more than 5 thousand users, we found out what innovation users consider the best.

New Privacy Settings

The most important innovation for users was the ability to hide your account from prying eyes. This option was voted for. 26% — more than a quarter of all respondents. In June 2019 new phone number privacy settings were added:

  1. All. Everyone can see your number in your profile.
  2. My contacts. By default, all your contacts (people whose number is in your notebook) get your phone number.
  3. Nobody. Your number is seen only by those who have added it to themselves.

The “Nobody” setting was improved in Telegram version 5.11. Starting with this version the user can choose who will be able to find it by phone number.

Archive

Archiving chats is a long-awaited tool for freeing up the list of conversations. After interviewing users, we found that the archive is used by 70% of respondents. However, only 20% go to it often, about 50% or do not open the archive at all or rarely open it.

After the introduction of archives, channels were less frequently viewed, so despite the fact that 18% of respondents consider the archive the best innovation of the year, 8% consider it the worst, probably for this reason.

Deleting other people’s messages in private messages

The most controversial innovation of this year is the ability to delete other people’s messages in a private chat. Telegram described this update as”complete control over any personal chat”. Now each user can delete any of their own or someone else’s message for both sides, in any private chat. Messages will disappear for both sides, leaving no trace. 17% of the surveyed users considered it the best update of the year, 19% called it the worst innovation of the year.

Users immediately perceived this opportunity ambiguously and opinions are strongly divided.

Schedule and silent messages

The silent messages were submitted in August of this year. Previously, this functionality was present only in channels. The admin could send a silent message to his followers when he didn’t want to disturb them. In Telegram version 5.10, it became possible to send such messages to channels, groups, and private messages. The user will receive a push notification, but without a sound.

Schedule messages were fully ready at the end of 2018, some developers managed to implement them in their clients. But at that time, the function only applied to channels. In this year’s September update, users were able to send delayed messages to both channels, groups, and private messages. The “favorites” section is no exception, moreover, sending a delayed message to that chat will work as a reminder to yourself. Later, the function was improved, in the context menu of sending a deferred message, the item “send when the user is online” appeared, a convenient variation of the deferred message, the user will receive the message as soon as he enters the messenger. It is important to note that the function does not work if the user has hidden the time of the last activity.

Animated stickers

The appearance of animated stickers in Telegram has become a long-awaited event for those users who are used to them in other messengers and social networks. Unlike other services, Telegram distinguished itself with free sets of sticker packs and the quality of their implementation. But as with every innovation, there are those who did not like it, they have the ability to disable looped animation: Settings – Chat settings – Loop animation.

Transfer of ownership rights

For channel administrators, this innovation has opened a simple opportunity to sell channels, and in addition solved the problem of a limited number of public channels and chats created on the account, now less necessary channels can simply be transferred to another account. It is worth noting that for such a transfer, you need to have two-factor authorization enabled on both accounts more than a week before the transfer.

Auto play video in the chat

Now the media in the chat can not only be loaded in the background, but also played back as you read the channels and chats, as it happens in classic social networks. In this case, the function can be turned off in the settings.

Location-Based Chats

Location-Based Chats is one of the most underrated features in the messenger, which appeared this year. Users were able to link chats to a specific geolocation, as well as find groups near them. The first weeks of the function was very popular, thousands of geochats were created in different cities and districts, but the popularity of geochats quickly declined, and now almost all of them are in disrepair.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that the ability to create and search for geochats is hidden deep in the Contacts menu, where it is almost impossible to find it without knowing about the presence of this function.

Animated emojis

An update that caused more negative emotions than positive ones. So only 2% considered it the best update of the year, while 13% called it the worst update. This is probably due to the fact that users do not know that animated emojis can be disabled in the settings: Settings – Chat settings – Large emojis.

Slowmode and global chat rights

Large chats are one of the most important functions of Telegram. Starting to develop groups in 2015, their limit was expanded from 2,000 users to 200,000 in 2018. However, as the chats grew larger, they became unmanageable. So first there were bots from third-party developers, which were designed to make the chat more calm. Global rights and slow mode have become features that allow you to set the required restrictions in large chats without resorting to bots, making them more convenient for communication.

Summing up the year, I remember a post written by Paul at the beginning of this year. A lot of features that users asked for were implemented, and a lot of bugs were fixed. The long-awaited launch of the TON network, which users (and investors) from all over the world have been waiting for for years, was postponed. However, the postponement of the launch of the main network and the courts did not break the faith of users in the messenger. And we believe that 2020 will be even more important for Telegram.

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