Telegram for VisionOS 😎

🎆 A major Telegram update with 11 new features is out, just 4 weeks after the previous one.

Among my favorite new features are Similar Channels and Story Reposts. Both give content creators new ways to grow their channels organically within Telegram.

Check out all the features in the blog post: https://telegram.org/blog/similar-channels

While our iOS users can already enjoy the new features, Android users are still waiting for the Google Play version to be reviewed by Google. If you use Android and don’t want to wait, you can download the direct version of Telegram. This version offers faster updates, fewer restrictions, and the lowest price for Telegram Premium subscriptions 🤫

✨ Launched less than one and a half years ago, Telegram Premium has become the fastest-growing paid subscription in the history of messaging apps.

The number of Premium subscribers has doubled in just 5 months and quadrupled in the last 12 months. Today it exceeded 4 million users.

A big thanks to everyone who signed up for Premium! We add great new features every month for our Premium subscribers — check them out at @premium 💝

🍭Merry Christmas, Telegrammers! The newest Telegram update lets you celebrate in style and congratulate your loved ones in new ways ❤️

With this update, you can also forward messages from channels to stories. Check out the full list of new features in our blog! 🧦

These are not all of our presents for you this festive season. Another major Telegram update is coming in the next few days 🛷

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🎆 I wish all our users peace, happiness, prosperity and inspiration in the new year. I have a very good feeling about 2024 ✨

Today we launched a new version of Telegram to let you congratulate your loved ones using our new, beautiful voice calls. The update contains a few surprises that we didn't cover in the blog – let's see if you can discover them 🎁

P. S. Stay healthy and don’t drink alcohol — don’t forget about the gym tomorrow 💪

🚀 5 million users are now subscribed to Telegram Premium — just 1 month (!) after we reached 4 million subscriptions.

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📹 We've made some great improvements to video message recording on iOS. Now, you can enjoy clearer video quality, switch between front and back cameras more quickly, experience less camera shake, and have the ability to pause and resume recording. Plus, we've introduced one-time video messages.

However, a minor bug was identified during the feature's initial launch two days ago. If you're encountering any issues with video message recording, please make sure your Telegram app is updated.

💫 For our Telegram Premium subscribers, there's a mighty update: you'll now be able to see the 'last seen' of other users who share this information, even if you choose to keep your 'last seen' hidden. The same logic now applies for the ‘read’ times in private chats.

There are more new features in this update — they will remain secret until our official blog post is out later this month 🤫

😝 Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start receiving financial rewards from their work.

Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views monthly. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized with Telegram Ads — a promotion tool designed with privacy in mind.

In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will start receiving 50% of any revenue that Telegram makes from displaying ads in their channels.

To ensure ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain. Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin. This will create a virtuous circle, in which content creators will be able to either cash out their Toncoins — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels 🤑

10,000 subscribers of mine are now happily enjoying their Telegram Premium thanks to this giveaway I prepaid on Fragment a few hours ago. Congratulations! 🥳

As a result, my channel reached Level 9 and I was able to set a fancy emoji status ☕️ and a wallpaper suitable for a @nerd 🤓

This February, we redefined many-to-many communication by adding 9 new features for group chats.

Now, groups can publish stories and save them as posts on their profile pages for all their members to enjoy. Group chats can also set their unique wallpapers and statuses, both visible to all their members. Group appearance can now be customized in detail: for example, group admins can choose a color and a logo for the group profile cover, or the style of links.

All these features are already available and are unlocked by group members who 'boost' their favorite chats (boosters can get special perks in the groups). Groups that prefer not to ask their members for boosts can instead conduct giveaways, similar to what I did in this channel today.

We wanted to include 5 more features in this update, but the App Store Gods were not in our favor. You will see these features very soon in our March update! 🍀

Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down. Interestingly, Telegram is more reliable than these services — despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user.

We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster.

Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime 🏅

👨‍💻 This week we launched the first batch of Telegram Business features. Users can now convert their personal Telegram accounts into business accounts. As a result, they will be able to add their location and opening hours, organize chats with color labels, use automatic greeting/away messages and shortcuts for quick replies.

That’s just the start — we are shipping more Telegram Business features this month. One of these features will revolutionize how people interact with chatbots. Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to an entirely new level.

The new Bot APIs for developers will become available later this month, all for free. Stay tuned — more exciting stuff is coming for businesses and developers on Telegram this season.

💰 Last week, we issued $330M worth of bonds to ensure Telegram can keep expanding at an accelerated speed.

This bond offering was oversubscribed, and we were delighted to have global funds of the highest caliber with impeccable reputations as participants. The terms of the bonds (when adjusted for the Federal Reserve rate) were the most favorable for Telegram in the history of our company.

I am proud that every time we issue bonds we get better at this process. The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization. This will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the “Goliaths” of our industry.