Telegram Releases Stories Feature for All Users

Popular mobile messaging app Telegram has announced a platform-wide rollout of its once premium-only Stories feature, in celebration of its 10-year anniversary.

The platform shared that amongst its 800 million active users, the Stories function was the most requested feature and that since the request was made it has been hard at work to offer a unique take on a feature that can be found in a majority of social media apps these days.

Based on first impressions, the platform accomplished exactly what it set out to do. At first glance, the stories might appear familiar but look a bit deeper and they’re full of customization options and unique features. These include the ability to choose the story’s lifespan with a range of 6 to 48 hours.

Other features include a media editing tool that allows users to elevate their stories with text, drawings, stickers, location tags, captions, web links and more. The Stories feature also has an optional Dual Camera Mode, which as it sounds, allows users to capture with both the front and rear cameras simultaneously.

Privacy features for Stories are also quite customizable, with users able to choose from four different levels, namely Everyone, My Contacts, Close Friends and Selected Contacts, with of course, the option to include or exclude specific users from any of these lists. More advanced options include the ability to disable screenshots.

While this once-premium feature has now gone public, there are still several benefits and perks to using it as a premium member. Including Stealth Mode, which allows premium users to erase the history of their Stories views from the last five minutes and the next 25 minutes from activation.

Other perks for premium users include priority display order, permanent view history even on expired Stories, the ability to save Stories to their gallery, longer caption length allowance and a greater Stories output limit, capped at 100 a day.

Telegram’s latest update is sure to bring new life and users to the app. Despite it not being an overly original concept, the unique features available through Stories provides a fresh and exciting take.

You can visit Telegram’s site for a complete guide to the new tool, or simply download and try it out for yourself now.

In other tech news, a new Instagram update allows music for photo carousels and up to three collaborators per post.