Telegram Chat App Gains Reply/Mention Alerts, Twitch Video Support, and More

Encrypted chat platform Telegram pushed out a new iOS app update on Sunday, with a new reply/mentions alert system among several other tweaks and improvements.

Since 2015 when Telegram first introduced the reply feature, the maximum group chat size has increased from a maximum 200 members to 10,000. As a result, new user mentions and replies in group chats can happen several times a day.

To help users stay on top of these messages, Telegram 4.3 has introduced a new in-app notification badge. Now, whenever someone replies to a user or mentions them in a group, an "@" symbol appears in the chats list. A tap on the new "@" button takes the user to the new replies/mentions and disappears once all the relevant messages have been read.

Elsewhere, the "Invite Friends" section in Contacts has been completely redesigned. Going forward, contacts that are not on Telegram yet but have many friends using it are now listed at the top, making it easier to invite them to the chat platform.

Twitch videos are now supported in the Telegram in-app player, so it's now possible to watch Twitch streams in Picture-in-Picture mode while chatting with friends. And when on a Telegram voice call, users can check the signal strength using the new indicator. It's also now possible to edit any photo pasted directly to a chat from clipboard before sending.

For those who use stickers in Telegram, anyone with five or more sticker sets installed can now mark individual stickers as "favorites" and have them always accessible at the top of the sticker panel in the "star" section. And large groups with 100 members and more can now choose an official sticker set for all the members of the group to see and use while they're chatting in the group, without having to add it to their panels.

Lastly, users can now switch between "This Chat" and "All Chats" when conducting a hashtag search, and when viewing Instant View pages in the app, it's now possible to open the original articles in Safari.

Telegram is a free download for iPhone and iPad from the App Store. [Direct Link]