Telegram brings in Interactive Emoji and new chat themes as key features in its latest update

To make your chat experience even more intriguing, Telegram Messenger has come up with a slew of new features in its latest monthly update. The popular messaging platform, which is said to be a challenger to WhatsApp, has added the option to place different Chat themes with different people, and a completely new way to experience the emoji sharing on one-on-one individual chats called Interactive Emoji. The app has introduced Read receipt feature for Telegram Private Groups, along with an option to record live stream video chats and audio session that can be shared later with others, as well.

Interestingly, this is the second major update for Telegram app within a span of one month to enhance user experience with high utility driven features.

Chat Themes

Telegram offers many features to organize chats and customize their appearance such as Chat Folders, Animated Backgrounds, etc. In this update, coordination and decoration come together with new themes for individual chats.

The app is now offerings 8 new themes that users can apply to specific private chats (one-to-one chats). Each of the new themes showcases colourful gradient message bubbles, beautifully animated backgrounds and unique background patterns.

Interactive Emoji

Telegram introduced a new way of sharing emotion in real time. Users need to simply send a single emoji to any private chats, and then tap on the animated emoji to unleash a full-screen effect. If both the parties involved in the one-on-one chat have the chat window open, the animations and vibrations play simultaneously on the devices for both of them. This makes the overall chat experience much more connected, expressive and close to the people.

Read Receipts in Small Groups

Both chat themes and interactive emoji currently only work in private chats. But this update also includes a big change for Telegram Groups.

Group messages are marked as read (??) as soon as one other member sees them. In small groups, users can now also select a message you sent to see which group members have read it.

In order to protect users’ privacy, read receipts in groups are only stored for 7 days after the message was sent.

Record Live Streams and Video Chats

Telegram hosts millions of communities that can create live events for unlimited viewers. Admins are now allowed to record Live Streams and Video Chats to publish them for those who missed the live version.

Admins can start a recording right from the Live Stream or Video Chat menu – with options to record Video and Audio or Only Audio. To record video, they need to choose an orientation for the final video file, Portrait or Landscape. Once the recording gets finished, or end the broadcast, the file is instantly uploaded to the Saved Messages window. Telegram offers free and unlimited encrypted cloud storage to its users where they store the same for long, re-download it anytime from any device as per their requirement. While recording, a red dot appears next to the title of the broadcast.

On this occasion, CEO and Founder Pavel Durov writes on his Telegram Channel Blog, “Another major Telegram update is out now after having been finally approved by Apple. It is packed with unique features that expand the boundaries of what a messaging app can do.

This new version of Telegram also contains an important upgrade that will allow our apps to work without interruption. Until now, Telegram used 32-bit values for the identifiers of users and channels. Due to its fast growth, Telegram had been quickly approaching the maximum number of 32-bit IDs, which is about 2.1 billion.

That’s why for the last 12 months we’ve been rebuilding nearly all of our apps, storage architecture and scripts to migrate to the 64-bit range (so we can expand to other galaxies without any issues). The latest update is critical to let new users sign up for Telegram and existing users keep creating channels and groups.”