Large communities on Telegram frequently use polls to coordinate their activities and stay in touch with their members. Today, we're rolling out a dedicated tool for polls in addition to existing bots like @vote. We hope the new built-in polls will be a welcome addition to groups with 100,000 members and channels with millions of subscribers.

Polls can be forwarded to increase reach and pinned for better visibility (and also to notify all members of the community).

At the moment, polls are anonymous, meaning that no one can see who voted for what. Going forward, we may introduce non-anonymous polls where the voters lists will be public, but such polls will be explicitly marked as non-anonymous.

Telegram has your back when it comes to privacy: we never disclose the private data you entrusted us with to third parties and never monetize it.

Image Search and Other Improvements on iOS

Back to more mundane matters, you can use Web Search again to find images when sending Photo & Video attachments or choosing profile pictures in our iOS app. Setting a Grinch avatar for Christmas has never been easier:

The Great iOS Bug Hunt goes on and the app received numerous fixes in version 5.1.1.

To name a few improvements: Clearing the cache in Settings > Data and Storage > Storage Usage now correctly reduces the space taken by the app. Files and media will keep downloading for a while after you close the app. You will see detailed progress when downloading and uploading files. We've also added online indicators for the ‘People’ section in search results.

Happy Winter Solstice!

December 22, 2018
The Telegram Team