Telegram for Android received a massive update today, featuring a full redesign along Android 5.0 material guidelines and adding long awaited features such as instant full-text cloud search, new flexible privacy settings for last-seen timestamps and account self-destruction.

Material Design

Every screen was updated to make Telegram consistent with Android 5.0 design standards and animations. We've also added support for the new standards on Android 4.x and even on older 2.x devices.

Demo

Here‘s what Telegram’s new material design looks like in motion on a Google Nexus phone, just to give you a taste of the animations:

Instant Full-Text Search

You can now find any message you sent or received in Telegram by using the universal search. Tapping a message in search results sends you to its place in your message history. This way you can find stuff even if you only vaguely remember the context.

The search is much faster than what you have in GMail and other apps. Our technology guarantees that even if your inbox grows to several hundred thousands of messages, instant search will stay just as fast.

Hiding Last Seen Time

We take privacy very seriously, so we invested a lot of time and effort to make this feature right. As a result, the Who can see your Last Seen time control allows unprecedented precision and flexibility.

In fact, it's so good that we wrote a whole separate blog post about it. Read more here:
Privacy Revolution — Last Seen Done Right »

Account Self-Destruction

Big companies like to accumulate data about their users and keep it for an indefinite time. Telegram is not a commercial organization and we value our disk space greatly. Last year we introduced self-destructing messages, today we are adding self-destructing accounts.

From now on, if you stop using Telegram and do not login for at least 6 months, your account will be deleted along with all messages, media, contacts and every other piece of data you store in the Telegram cloud. You can change the exact period after which your inactive account will self-destruct – with options ranging from 1 month to 1 year.

..but I'm on iOS

Most of these new features are also avaible to iOS fans among Telegram users — except for material design of course. In order to maintain the balance, we're also adding a few nifty features to our iOS app today. Read all about them here:
The new Telegram for iOS — GIF search and more »

The Telegram Team,
November 19, 2014