Telegram adds custom notification sounds, new chat muting options, more

Telegram Messenger (Image credit: Luke Filipowicz/iMore)

What you need to know

Telegram has enabled a feature that allows the setting of custom alert tones.
Any sound less than five seconds long and smaller than 300KB in size can now be set as an alert tone.
Other improvements include the ability to set a custom mute duration for the first time.

Telegram, one of the more popular secure instant messaging services, has released a new iOS app update that adds support for custom notification sounds and more.

The new update, which can be downloaded from the App Store, allows people to select their own custom notification tone. That tone can be anything including short audio files, voice messages, and more. If it's a sound, Telegram now lets you see that as a notification tone. However, note that the sound must be less than five seconds long and smaller than 300KB in size.

Those who would prefer their chats don't make any sound at all also have a new feature — custom mute durations. Now, Telegram users can tell the app to mute a chat for 9 minutes, for example.

For years, Telegram users have been able to temporarily mute chats to take a break from notifications, like for 8 hours or 2 days. Now you can also pause notifications for a specific duration, like the length of a midday nap or extended vacation.Each chat has a streamlined menu for modifying alerts – choose Disable Sound to receive notifications silently, or one of the Mute options to turn off notifications completely.

There are a number of other improvements including improvements to bots and a whole lot more. You can learn about everything the latest Telegram update has to offer in the announcement blog post.

Telegram is one of the best iPhone chat apps in the App Store and you can download it for free right now.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.