Telegram has gone from humble beginnings as a simple messaging client, to a rather powerful platform which encompasses private and group communication, AI bots and more. In today’s update, there’s a heap of new functions, including AMP-like previews of links to certain websites (including Medium), a publishing tool of their own to allow longer-form content to be shared amongst users, and an ability to search past conversations by date — helpful if you know when something happened, but can’t find it via a keyword search.
The previews of websites is limited, for now, to certain websites like Medium and a couple of others, but we can only hope in future that it enables wider adoption, allowing other websites to provide mobile formatted content which will instantly preview within the Telegram app. If your chosen website isn’t supported, you can now craft your content (fairly simplistically) in Telegram’s own publishing platform, which will preview instantly when shared via Telegram.
Finding old conversations might not be important to you, but to some users it’s key; at Ausdroid, we use Telegram extensively for our team communication, and often we’re having to go back and find things from days, weeks or even months ago. The ability to narrow down searches by date will be very helpful, I predict.
On top of these new features, there’s a lick of paint for the Android app, with a new interface, improved security, faster camera speed for when taking pics and videos, better video compression, a subtler photo viewer, and easier ways to edit messages and add captions. You can update your Telegram app, or if you haven’t tried it out yet, now is a good time to do so.
