Telegram 4.3 has been made available for users to download on iOS and Android. The new update is a biggie and includes the so-called notification centre which Pavel Durov promised earlier in the year. It’s not really a notification centre, rather a badge that appears next to the unread message count in the chat menu to notify you that you’ve been mentioned – the feature is only included with group chats.
Another cool feature in this release is the revamped Invite Friends pane. We all know that in most countries, Telegram is not the most popular messenger on the block and most people say they don’t want to use it because their friends use something else. Now, with the new Invite Friends pane, contacts not on Telegram will be ranked by the amount of their friends already using the app. When you invite them to join there’s more chance that those with lots of contacts on the app will stick around.
Other features in this release include:
- Add favourite stickers to the top of the sticker panel for easier access.
- Groups with 100 members can add default stickers to the group which members can see and use without saving the collection to their own panels.
- Twitch videos are now supported in the Telegram in-app player, so you can watch Twitch streams in Picture-in-Picture mode while chatting with your friends.
- When on a Telegram voice call, you can now check the signal strength thanks to the new indicator.
- On iOS, you can edit any photo you pasted directly to a chat from clipboard before sending.
- On Android, when forwarding a message, you can long tap to select multiple recipients.
- On Android when viewing photos in Shared Media, you can go to the place in chat where the photo was posted.
- On Android, if you have many new messages in many active chats, synchronisation will happen much, much faster.
The Telegram team topped off their blog post by mentioning that another update is already being worked on.