Last month we've launched a $50,000 contest for Blackberry engineers. We have received 4 applications, but none of the contestants have fulfilled the goals so far. We've decided to extend the competition for an extra month.

In order to avoid confusion and make public testing of the apps possible, we ask all contestants to upload their apps to BB World by January 25, 2015 and send the app together with the store link to code@telegram.org.

Please don't use the name Telegram or the official logos for these apps. The rest of the goals remains the same — we're looking for a fast, reliable and stylish messenger for Blackberry devices. New contestants are welcome to join!

Porting vs. Native code

Originally, we suggested adapting the Android version to get working apps to the users faster. But we‘ve noticed that porting Android code can create considerable overhead, so don’t hesitate to rewrite parts of the app (or all of it) in native code if necessary.

December 25, 2014
The Telegram Team

The official Telegram app for Windows, OSX and Linux is now available in compact mode — you can resize the window so that only a single column remains. This makes it easier to use Telegram on smaller desktop or laptop screens.

You can download Telegram Desktop at desktop.telegram.org. As of last week, this app is also available in the Mac AppStore, alongside with our native OSX app.

To log in on your computer, simply enter your phone number and get a code delivered via Telegram to your phone. All your messages (except those from Secret Chats) are instantly synced between all your devices, so you can continue right where you left off.

December, 22
The Telegram Team

One of the best beloved features of our iOS app finally comes to Telegram for Android. You can now easily search the web for GIFs and images and send them to your friends.

To do this, simply open the Gallery attachment menu — you will find the new Search Web and Search GIF tabs at the top.

Your recent gifs and images will be saved, so you can send them again with just a few taps. This is very useful when you're out of words and emoji are just not enough.

Stay tuned for more updates this year!

December 20,
The Telegram Team

Thanks to your support, we have reached a new milestone – over 1 billion messages are delivered daily. Telegram now has 50 million active users, adding 1 million new signups each week.

This is insane. 16 months ago Telegram didn't exist, and today it is used by millions of people all over the world – from Spain and Brazil to Malaysia and South Korea. We spent $0 on advertising Telegram and trusted you – our users – to spread the word. The results are amazing and are entirely your achievement. Thank you!

December 8, 2014
The Telegram Team

Our iOS and Android apps got updated with three new features today.

Opening a telegram.me/YourUsernameHere link on your phone will now automatically fire up your Telegram app and open a chat with that user. You can share username links with friends, write them on business cards or put them up on your website.

Here's what people will see if they don't have Telegram yet

Changing Your Phone Number

It is easy to switch to Telegram and retain your social graph, since it is based on phone numbers. But what if you need to change the phone number itself? As of today, you can change your number in Telegram — and keep everything, including all your contacts, messages and media from the Telegram cloud, as well as all your secret chats.

Your mutual contacts (people in your contacts, who also have your number) will get your new number added to your contact in their address book unless you have blocked them in Telegram. This makes changing numbers even easier.

Perfect Forward Secrecy

Last but not least, Telegram's Secret Chats now support Perfect Forward Secrecy. What this means is that your Secret Chats will now automatically change encryption keys after a period of time, in order to keep past communications safe. This way you no longer need to manually re-create Secret Chats to achieve this level of security.

And that's it for today. Stay tuned for more updates coming your way on all platforms!

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December 1, 2014
The Telegram Team

Telegram for Android received a massive update today, featuring a full redesign along Android 5.0 material guidelines and adding long awaited features such as instant full-text cloud search, new flexible privacy settings for last-seen timestamps and account self-destruction.

Material Design

Every screen was updated to make Telegram consistent with Android 5.0 design standards and animations. We've also added support for the new standards on Android 4.x and even on older 2.x devices.

Demo

Here‘s what Telegram’s new material design looks like in motion on a Google Nexus phone, just to give you a taste of the animations:

Instant Full-Text Search

You can now find any message you sent or received in Telegram by using the universal search. Tapping a message in search results sends you to its place in your message history. This way you can find stuff even if you only vaguely remember the context.

The search is much faster than what you have in GMail and other apps. Our technology guarantees that even if your inbox grows to several hundred thousands of messages, instant search will stay just as fast.

Hiding Last Seen Time

We take privacy very seriously, so we invested a lot of time and effort to make this feature right. As a result, the Who can see your Last Seen time control allows unprecedented precision and flexibility.

In fact, it's so good that we wrote a whole separate blog post about it. Read more here:
Privacy Revolution — Last Seen Done Right »

Account Self-Destruction

Big companies like to accumulate data about their users and keep it for an indefinite time. Telegram is not a commercial organization and we value our disk space greatly. Last year we introduced self-destructing messages, today we are adding self-destructing accounts.

From now on, if you stop using Telegram and do not login for at least 6 months, your account will be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Telegram cloud. You can change the exact period after which your inactive account will self-destruct – with options ranging from 1 month to 1 year.

..but I'm on iOS

Most of these new features are also avaible to iOS fans among Telegram users — except for material design of course. In order to maintain the balance, we're also adding a few nifty features to our iOS app today. Read all about them here:
The new Telegram for iOS — GIF search and more »

The Telegram Team,
November 19, 2014

OK, so there is a celebration in the Android camp today. Telegram for Android was redesigned and loaded with new features. But what about the iPhone fan army? It turns out, the iOS app got something just as great.

In addition to granular controls for hiding your Last Seen and other privacy settings, today’s iPhone update introduces a great media feature – Animated GIF search.

How Does This Work?

You can find and share images from the Web using the “Find Images” attachment option. Today the Web image search got two new tabs – GIFs and Recent. The GIFs tab allows you to search through thousands of great GIF animations, powered by Giphy. Just type in a keyword and have fun.

All images from the Web and GIFs you share will be saved in the Recent tab. You can go that tab whenever you're out of words and instantly share any of them just in three quick taps. If you forward an incoming GIF to a contact, that animation will also be available from the Recent tab. And yes, you can send multiple GIFs at once.

One More Thing

Another media feature we added to the iPhone app today are previews for YouTube and Instagram links. If a message contains nothing but a link to YouTube or Instagram, it will be transformed into a thumbnail with relevant information, such as title and duration. Check it out!

..but I'm on Android

All of this is coming to our Android app in the next updates. So for now, sit back and enjoy your new privacy settings and material design. Soon we'll have GIFs and images for you as well!

The Telegram Team
November 19, 2014

Each day our volunteer-driven support team gets several thousand requests from our users to help them hide their Last Seen time. We knew it's important, and have been working hard to get this feature right. We wanted to make sure that Telegram users would have unprecedented precision and flexibility, without the usual tradeoffs.

Starting today, you can specify exactly who will see your Last Seen time in both our iOS and Android apps. You can choose between the three basic options (“Everybody”, “My Contacts” and “Nobody”) and add any number of exceptions into the “Always Share With…” and “Never Share With…” sections.

For example, this way you can make your Last Seen time available to everybody but your boss, or to nobody with the exception of your marriage partner (or vice versa, it's up to you). If you’d like to share your Last seen time only with your contacts plus the members of some work-related group you have, you can do it in just a few taps. This makes countless combinations possible.

Why Is This Important?

To make things fair, you won’t see Last Seen timestamps for people with whom you don‘t share your own. That’s why it‘s important to have granular controls — Telegram’s precision helps you avoid difficult choices. For example, you don't need to choose between hiding your Last Seen from your boss and being able to know when your best friend was online. You can have both.

Last Seen Recently

Of course, the absence of a Last Seen timestamp makes it difficult to know whether the person you're about to contact is a regular user of Telegram and will be able to read your message. That is why even if the exact Last Seen time is hidden, you will still see an approximate value, like “last seen recently” (i.e. from one minute ago to about 3 days) or “last seen within a month”. This keeps stalkers away, but makes it possible to understand whether a person is reachable over Telegram.

Speaking of inactive users, we're not going to have too many of them soon. Starting today, Telegram accounts will self-destruct after 6 months of inactivity by default.

Self-Destructing Accounts

Big companies like to accumulate data about their users and keep it for an indefinite time. Telegram is not a commercial organization and we value our disk space greatly. Last year we introduced self-destructing messages, today we are adding self-destructing accounts.

From now on, if you stop using Telegram and do not login for at least 6 months, your account will be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Telegram cloud. You can change the exact period after which your inactive account will self-destruct – with options ranging from 1 month to 1 year.

These new features are already available in our iOS and Android apps. Stay tuned for more privacy-related updates.

The Telegram Team,
November 19, 2014

A lot of Telegram users asked us to support Blackberry 10 devices. As a small team, we have to choose areas to focus on. But since Telegram API is 100% open and free, any independent developer can port Telegram for Blackberry 10 if they study our protocol and the Java code used in our Android app.

To give an incentive to Telegram fans among Blackberry engineers, we are announcing a month-long coding contest starting today. Your task is to port Telegram for BB 10 using the open source Java code of the Android app. A prize fund of $50,000 will be distributed among the winners.

Objectives

Of course, you could just compile our Android code for use on the BB platform, but there are three more things to think about:

• Native BB design. We designed Telegram for BB 10 and provide you with screenshots and graphics, but you need to implement it.
• Native BB notifications. We have set up an API for that, they are obviously absent in our Android-version.
• Speed and stability. Our Android code is not optimized to run on BB 10 and there’d definitely be overhead if you don't refactor it.

Specs

For a detailed description, screenshots and all necessary graphics, please check out the
Blackberry Contest Description.

End Date

Please send your BB apps to us at code@telegram.org by the 13th of December. We will announce the winners here on our Blog on the 25th of December. Please don't publish your source code before that date so that we can establish the true winners.

The prize budget will be distributed between contributors with the fastest, most stable and smooth running apps. The biggest prize here, however, is a great looking and fast Telegram app for Blackberry – for all the Blackberry and Telegram fans out there.

November 13, 2014
The Telegram Team