Q. Was the "download story to gallery" feature worth it to become a premium feature?

A. "That is not 100% certain, but there is a reason why none of the major social media platforms allow to save media content locally on the device.

They are trying to incentivize link sharing to drive additional views and potential followers for their content creators. So allowing to save content for everyone may have an adverse effect on people creating original content, as people would be just stealing their content and reposting as their own rather then linking it.

When limited only to a small fraction of users (in this case, premium, similar to YouTube), saving other people’s content becomes less of an issue."

@Durov / @Nerd

Source : 💌💌💌

Q. Why formatting is premium?

A. "We decided to make formatting premium for now out of concern that promoters and spammers will start embedding links to advertise their referral links and Telegram will become a giant junk marketplace.

Telegram stories are a new genre not only because they are very visible right in the chat list, but also because they can be cross posted in the profile page grids. Active links in these places can become a spammer’s dream. Again, there is a reason why platforms like Instagram don’t allow clickable links in captions for posts.

Spam is a tricky animal: if you set the wrong incentives, it will be so commercially appealing so it will become next to impossible to stop it.

Having said that, other parts of formatting (bold, italic etc) in captions can easily become available for free. We just paywalled all formatting for now as it was easier to implement. However, the current limitation is easy to bypass, as anyone who wants to emphasize some text can simply add it on the media in the editor instead of using the caption."

Source : 💌💌💌

@Durov

Android Redesign - probably the 10th year of the Android app : 20 /October/ 2013.

Q. "If you considered this format to publish channel messages in stories? Implementing a link that when touching the image takes you to the original post"

Durov : "We consider a lot of features internally. Specifically about the feature you are asking, we reviewed countless design versions for it in the last 5 months."