Telegram is launching its own version of Stories, the short-lived multimedia format made popular by Snapchat and copied by every social media app under the sun.
Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the chat app shared the news(opens in a new tab) in his Telegram channel on Monday.
“For years, our users have asked us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests we receive are related to Stories,” he wrote. According to Durov, the company was initially against adding the feature because Stories are “already everywhere,” but changed its mind and decided to listen to its users and launch Stories the “Telegram way.”
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Telegram’s version of the Story feature includes granular privacy controls, dual camera support, caption support, and the ability to set the story when it expires or leave it available constantly.
Stories will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful, Durov said, while channels will gain greater exposure and subscribers once the company launches the ability to repost channel messages in Stories.
According to Durov, even those on the Telegram team who objected to the feature started liking it after internal testing. “We can no longer imagine Telegram without him,” he wrote.
Telegram Stories is currently in its “final testing phase” and will be available in early July.
