Messaging app Telegram has announced a new raft of features for Android users, including some that you’re unlikely to find in other messenger apps. It's the second tranch of updates to Telegram in the past few months, as the battle between competing platforms continues.

The Pinned Messages feature now lets you pin a number of threads — great for multitasking between different people where you want to keep conversations separate, or perhaps you’re talking with the same person about several different things at the same time. To use it, you can either tap the top bar to cycle through the threads or use the newly added button to move them all to their own page. This is the first time that pinning has applied to one-to-one conversations, as well as group chats.

 

Also new, where users are sharing their live location with you, you can set an alert to tell you when they’re nearby. Additionally, the map will now show what direction you’re going in, so you can guide them in to meet you more easily. If that wasn't enough, when you send multiple songs over Telegram, the receiver now gets sent a playlist. When you start playing one, the entire playlist will be added to a queue in Telegram’s built-in media player. You can choose to separate each song from the playlist if you prefer, but there’s no doubt this is a much tidier way of doing it.

Finally, there are new analytics tools for your shared posts. You can view data for the whole channel, or for individual posts. You can even see where your post has been forwarded into public channels. There are some fancy new animations and emojis to choose from, plus you can now annotate a photograph from someone you’re chatting to in-line, without downloading it and reuploading it.

All these features are available now by updating your Telegram app in the Play Store. As Telegram notes, “If you're on iOS, you'll get the update as soon as either a) Apple finishes reviewing it OR b) you decide it's time to switch to Android.”

Well, we didn’t like to say, but….

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