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Public groups can now enable join requests – allowing group admins to review new members before approving them to write in the chat. Users who open the group can tap Request to Join, adding their request to a list that only admins can access. You can choose to share either your current or your live location. Send My Current Location will provide a one-time update about where you are. As you can see in the below image, the app lets you manually change this before sending, so don't trust locations blindly. In addition to manually selecting a point on the map, you can choose a nearby place from a list. Telegram gives you an option where you can select who can see your last seen time. To configure this, go to “Settings”, “Privacy and Security” and then tap on “Last Seen & Online”. You can share it with everybody, or people in your contact list, or nobody, or add exceptions like “never share with” XYZ.

If you do not want this to happen and want Telegram to keep running in the background to send you notifications in real-time, you can head over to Settings/ Notifications and Sounds/ Keep Alive Service and turn it on. You can surely delete messages that you have sent, but did you know that Telegram has brought a new feature that lets you delete messages sent by other users too. That’s kind of weird, but this feature is for users who prioritize privacy over everything. To use this feature, just select the received message and tap on the “delete” button. Now, select “Also delete for X” and tap on “Delete”. The message will disappear from both ends without leaving any trace. Drafts Telegram is kind of a big deal for me.

Custom Theme Telegram A recently introduced feature, Telegram’s new Group Voice Chats allow users in a group to initiate a common group voice chat for all members. However, users can choose to drop out of the ongoing group chat and re-enter at any given point. To make use of this, head into any group of choice and tap on the group name. Now head to the three-dot menu on the top right and choose Start Voice Chat. To create a poll in a channel or group, simply select the “Poll” option in the attachment menu. Type in your question, add answer options and choose the configurations that fit your purpose best. To lock a chat go to Settings->Privacy and Security->Passcode Lock and enable it. Once you create a passcode and enable it, you will be able to lock and unlock your chats by tapping on the lock icon at the top right of the app.

Possibly the biggest disadvantage Telegram has over more popular messages is simply that: popularity. Despite its hundreds of millions of fans, Telegram is still leagues behind WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat in active monthly users. Now tap on Notifications and mute the contact for either a custom period of time or forever. I generally leave it for forever.