Telegram X, the sort of beta testing ground for new Telegram features, received its July update, bringing a whole host of new features. Some of these include locked Secret Chats, a whole new GIF playback system, MTProxy support, and playing voice messages through your phone's earpiece.

If you're on the beta channel, you've probably seen some of these trickle down to you, but those on the stable version get hit with this flood. Let's take a look at the substantial changelog:

  • Passcodes and fingerprint unlock for Secret Chats
  • GIF playback: play, pause, rewind, restart
  • Three new Shared tabs: GIFs, voice messages, video messages
  • MTProxy and censorship circumvention
  • Voice message playback through phone earpiece
  • Dynamic unread counter
  • Mark as read/unread through notification/chat previews
  • View messages from specific chat members
  • New hashtag search UI
  • Polished and reworked all of the application icons to look sharp on any screen density
  • Reduced APK and installed application size by up to 5MB (depending on the device abi). Most popular APK variant is about 13MB now.
  • Reduced application launch time
  • Huge amount of work to bring cloud lang pack support. Relevant section allowing changing app language will appear in settings soon.
  • Completely reworked application (non-cloud) storage for better performance and less disk space usage.
  • account list open/close state
  • "Places" are back and work properly
  • Reset synced contacts & Contact sync settings
  • Last seen timestamp is now always shown on the profile screen
  • Clickable usernames in sticker pack names
  • Delete inline bots from recent list (@)
  • /help and /settings shortcuts in bot's three-dot menu, when available
  • Play/pause button while viewing videos on Telegram
  • "Silent Broadcast" setting in channels is now synchronized across all devices
  • Fingerprint animation in Passcode
  • Reduced application size
  • Better notification management and hints
  • Updated libtgvoip
  • Playback position is now properly saved when you pause/resume app while playing videos.
  • Reduced memory & battery consumption taken by inline results.
  • List of occupied public links when limit reached in manage channel / manage supergroup
  • Changed style of "Delete Synced Contacts" pop-up
  • Completely reworked delete chat / return to chat logic (delete chat / leave group / leave channel / clear history / return to group / return to channel buttons) on all screens (chats list, chat itself, profile)
  • Added: Clear Payment and Shipping Info
  • Added: Suggest Contacts toggle
  • Added: "Copyright" as chat report reason
  • Added: Settings - Privacy & Security - Clear all cloud drafts
  • Added: Settings - Privacy & Security - Clear all cloud drafts
  • Moved: Websites to Settings - Privacy and Security - Active Sessions
  • Moved: Incognito Keyboard to Settings - Privacy and Security
  • Moved "Link Previews in Secret Chats" setting to: Settings - Privacy and Security - Secret Chats.
  • Moved: Destroy group / channel is now located on manage group / channel screen inside three-dot menu (and only if there's less than 1000 members)
  • Moved: "Save to Downloads/Music", "Save GIF" are now located in "More" message menu
  • Improved: Terminate session / terminate all sesions pop-up style
  • Improved: Quality of sending photos
  • Improved: Animation when you open media viewer
  • Improved: Color of the "Disconect All Websites" button
  • Improved: Style of "Reset Notification Settings" pop-up
  • Improved: Color of the slider in media viewer
  • Improved: Animation of the PiP play/pause button
  • Improved: GIFs playback stops when playing video or specific GIF in fullscreen mode for battery saving and playback performance
  • Improved: Prompt when trying to insert link for the first time in secret chats
  • Improved: When new message arrives into the open chat, sound will play only for messages that need notification
  • Improved: "Too Many Requests: retry after X" error message
  • Improved: USER_NOT_MUTUAL_CONTACT error message
  • Improved: Contextual information in pop-ups (i.e. user names or chat titles) is now highligted in bold
  • Improved: Censorship circumvention
  • Improved: Relative date calculation
  • Improved: "Disconnect all websites" pop-up style
  • Improved: Added "Done" pop-up when clearing payment & shipping info
  • Improved: GIF preview open animation
  • Improved: "Unable to play GIF" when an unlikely error occurred during GIF playback
  • Improved: "More" is no longer visible in the message, if only 1 more menu item available (it displays instantly instead)
  • Improved: "Clear Recent Stickers" alert style
  • Improved: Error message when it's not possible to perform specific action
  • Improved: Error message in "Inline Bot" tab, when user suggestions are disabled in Settings
  • Improved: title for voice messages on shared voice tab
  • Improved: synced strings with the ones on the cloud platform
  • Improved: Style of "Clear recent emojis", "Delete sticker pack", "Archive sticker pack" pop-ups
  • Improved: Style of "Change Number" pop-up
  • Improved: Hint when trying to open media with a timer by tap
  • Improved: Inline buttons width calculation (e.g. in bubble mode it will match bubble width, when it fits)
  • A multitude of bugfixes that I won't list here

As with any Telegram X stable update, this is a lot to sort through. Obviously, there are some major highlights to address. Secret Chats can now be locked with a passcode, which will hide the contents of the chat from the main list. You can also unlock passcode-protected chats with your fingerprint.

GIF playback has been improved, where you can play, pause, rewind, or restart it. Fullscreen GIFs will also play at full quality with no compression. And if you've turned off autoplay, the preview you see will be full resolution instead of a blurry image.

Another major addition is MTProxy supprt and other proxy quick-switching. This update also includes the "latest censorship circumvention techniques" if that is a concern for you in your home nation. You can even check if you need to use a proxy to access Telegram in your country.

 

Users of voice messages (which I don't count myself among) can now play the recordings they receive over their phone's earpiece. Simply raise your device to your ear after selecting play. Or you can just tell Telegram X to always pipe messages through the earpiece.

Chats also got a lot of changes, some fairly minor, so we'll speed through the important bits quickly. New messages will be read as you scroll through the chat, but if you have to leave before finishing every new item, Telegram X will save your position for when you return. A huge boon for me, but you can now mark chats as read/unread from the notifications, or from the chat previews. When deleting Secret Chats, you'll now have the option to delete the record for the other end, too.

There's a hefty amount of finer changes in the blog post that you can check out if you're interested. The source link will be below. You can download the app through the Play Store or we have it over on APK Mirror if you'd prefer.

Source: Telegram X