Telegram launches premium subscription with more features
Want to maximize your Telegram app? The encrypted messaging app now provides a better messaging experience as it officially launches a premium subscription tier and celebrates over 700 million active users.
The company announced on June 19 that Telegram Premium users may "unlock doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management – and a whole lot more."
Telegram Premium subscribers will receive a special badge displayed next to their name in chat and member lists. Aside from this, they may also convert voice messages to text while being able to rate the transcriptions. No ads, new icons, and animated profile pictures are also among the promised updates for the premium tier.
Though they have yet to specify subscription costs that will vary per location, Telegram Premium pushes for the monetization of the company’s growing subscription base for a price range of $5 to $6 (P270 to P324), according to a report by Tech Crunch.
This move comes as a response to the increasing user demand, as previously shared by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
“After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option,” Durov announced last June 10, prior to the promised launch.
Subscriptions will, thus, allow Telegram to continuously offer all "resource-heavy features,” all the while preserving free access for non-premium users, who may still utilize some premium benefits. “All existing features that users have come to expect and rely on for nearly a decade remain free.
"Moreover, non-premium users will be able to enjoy some of Premium's benefits,” Telegram’s statement read. The said benefits for non-subscribers include being able to download extra-large documents, view stickers sent by premium users, and tap to add counters on premium reactions.
Additionally, improvements like “join requests” for public groups, verification badges, and better bot descriptions are available for everybody. For Android users, specifically, chat previews and an automatic saving-to-gallery update have been improved. As for iOS, an animated external sharing has been updated among other upgrades.