It’s that time of the month again that we’re getting new features from Telegram. To celebrate their launch 8 years ago, we’re getting version 8.0 of the app and new features include unlimited viewers for live streams on groups and channels, more forwarding options, jumping to the next unread channel, an improved sticker panel, and new animated emoji as always. But there also seems a not-so-welcome change with this update, at least for those who use the app on their smartwatch, as they have discontinued support for their Wear OS app.
Let’s go to the good things first with this latest Telegram update. If you’re hosting live streams in a channel or a video chat in a group, you now get support for unlimited viewers. As Telegram says, you can actually run a “TV station” on the app as anyone can watch your videos and you can go as high as hundreds of thousands. If you’re an admin, you can go ahead and start a Video Chat in your groups or a Live Stream in your Channels. Viewers can raise their hand if they want to join the broadcast and if you will let them.
When you’re forwarding a message on the platform, you can now put it first in a preview window so you can see what it will look like when sent. You can now choose to hide the sender’s name or hide the captions if it’s a media message. If you change your mind about forwarding, you can deselect messages or change the recipient if you accidentally tapped the wrong chat. This should prevent forwarding mistakes on your part.
The update has other features like making it easy to jump to the next channel that has unread messages without having to go back to your chat list, showing trending stickers above your recently used in the sticker panel, larger previews for sticker suggestions, unread comment counters on channels, and of course, new animated emoji. You can always expect a lot of new features and improvements on updates for the app and this is no exception.
However, if you like using Telegram on your Wear OS device, we have bad news. 9 to 5 Google says that the Wear OS app for Telegram has been discontinued. You can still access it if you’ve previously downloaded it but don’t expect any more updates in the future and it may stop working soon as well. It is now gone from the Google Play Store so no chance to download or re-download it.
