Telegram introduces a Power Saving Mode for battery preservation

Telegram has introduced a new Power Saving Mode to preserve the battery of your device. The mode kicks in when the battery dips below a certain percentage — which is configurable — and turns off resource-intensive features like auto-playing videos and GIFs, sticker animations and background updates.

The new feature has its own menu in settings, which also has individual toggles for auto-playing videos, GIFs, sticker animations, emoji animations, interface effects, preloading media and background updates (for iOS only). Users can turn these off permanently to save battery. The company said that it tested more than 200 Android phones and created “optimized default settings” for them.

Notably, WhatsApp doesn’t have a power saver mode, but it has settings to disable auto-download of media to save battery and storage.

Apart from the new battery-saving mode, Telegram has also rolled out a playback speed control for videos in chat. You can choose default speeds like 0.5x,1x,1.5x and 2x, or use the slider to choose a custom speed.

What’s more, Telegram is introducing an auto-invite group links feature. When you are selecting people to join a group, if they have disabled auto-joining, they will be sent an invite link.

Along with this, Telegram is also pushing features like read time for messages in groups with less than 100 members, new animated emojis and interactive reactions, translated bot descriptions and improved folder support on iOS.

These features are rolling out to all users with the latest Telegram update.

Last year, Telegram launched a premium subscription for $5 a month in June with features like exclusive stickers and reactions, and the ability to upload large files. In December, the company said that it had crossed the mark of 1 million paying users.