Live Locations, Media Player and Languages

Starting with Telegram 4.4, you can broadcast your current location to any chat in real time.

This is useful when you are on your way to an appointment or are trying to coordinate with friends at a large event. Instead of sending static locations on the map every minute, you can now share your Live Location with the people you’re meeting – for 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours.

To use this feature, select ‘Location’ from the attachment menu and choose ‘Share My Location for…’:

You can also share your Live Location in groups, and if other members of the group do the same, you’ll get an interactive map of everyone’s current coordinates. Thanks to a bar at the top of the screen, you will always remember who you’re sharing your location with. And you only need two taps to stop sharing whenever you choose to.

New Media Player

We’ve completely redesigned our in-app audio player to better support the playback of MP3s and other music files you send and receive. Try the @cctracks channel for a demo – we’ve uploaded some free music there to demonstrate how the new media player works. After downloading an audio file, tap the play button to start listening. To view the cover image and the rest of the chat's playlist, tap on the title of the playing track in the top bar.

More Languages

We’re also launching a new translation platform for Telegram apps. Starting today, Telegram is available in French, Indonesian, Malay, Russian and Ukrainian – with more languages like Persian coming soon. Telegram now supports 13 languages, which are available in Settings.

If you don’t like how a specific element in Telegram's interface is translated in your language, you can now use the localization platform to suggest an alternative word or phrase. Everyone can suggest translations and vote for them, making Telegram localization a community-driven effort.

Screenshots make translations easier

Unlike other services, Telegram can instantly push new translations of words and phrases to the apps. Thanks to this, users won't need to wait for an update in the stores to get the new localized version.

This also means that our developers won't have to wait for all translations to be finished before the apps are released, so this new interface will speed up Telegram development too.

Better Group Chats

As always, we’re trying to make Telegram group chats better. In large groups, you can now recognize messages from admins by the new ‘admin’ badge. And Admins in supergroups can now control whether new members get to see the earlier message history.

October 10, 2017
The Telegram Team