Release notes guide · 4 min read

Telegram Changelog and Release Notes: A Review

Review at a glance

Based on a book Release Notes People Actually Want to Read.

Telegram, a well-known messaging app, creates updates within its stories. These updates are short, entertaining, visual, and educational, perfect for presenting new features in a consumer-centric app. This document will teach you how to explain features concisely, scale the explanation, and produce release notes in 18 languages.

What Telegram does well

Explain in 30 seconds or cut

If you’re unfamiliar with Telegram, this new feature may be confusing. But don’t worry—you’ll get the hang of it in less than a minute. This represents a concise feature adoption cycle. Showing immediate results and simplicity of use encourages people to explore the feature further, offering outstanding results with minimal effort.

Let’s highlight the main aspects of their approach:

1. A clear example with a straightforward title: ‘Sticker maker’ for a custom sticker.

2. The zoomed and animated button instantly initiates your learning journey. This document will guide you on how to locate it and achieve your initial results.

3. In a few steps, you’ll see how easy it is to make a custom sticker:

4. After a few seconds, you’ll see the result. Impress your friends by replying with a custom sticker.

Explain a feature at any scale

You can read their announcements from one picture to one article. In one animation. In one story. In one video. In one blog post.

Check their image of the ‘custom sticker editor’ announcement.

A 9 second description for their ‘Quick reply feature’:

And a post: https://telegram.org/blog/new-saved-messages-and-9-more

They are providing the results of the feature at every scale and explaining its usage.

Media details for usage context

Take note of their screenshots and videos. They never use Lorem Ipsum text. If you pause any video, you’ll see an example of a real-world conversation, images, names. This approach provides a better context for explaining usage.

Release notes in 18 languages

That’s the biggest amount of languages in our rating.

View the original localized example

Assessing the quality of translations can be challenging. However, it seems it’s not solely AI translation, since they highlight terms and link to related articles.

View the original localized example

Public feature suggestions and bug reports

They’re commendable for their transparency and feedback tools. Although these tools may not be easily found, they exist and show that they’re actively listening to their community and some suggestions became features.

Check Ducalis Voting Board to make a similar tool for collecting feedback from your users.

Areas for improvement

More delivery channels

On one hand Telegram is the media channel itself. It have a huge core audience. Their priorities are obvious — publish updates inside their platform. They have enough users for that. But it’s not a bad idea to make updates more multichannel. Adding Email, especially for business users features.

Improved updates on minor changes

Telegram emphasizes privacy and transparency. It could be beneficial for certain user groups to be aware of the list of bug fixes and receive a digest of their updates.

That’s could be easily done with a auto-digest with the Ducalis changelog.

Conclusion

Telegram is an excellent example of a large consumer app with about 900 million users. It has consistent, decent, and well-constructed release notes along with a public bug reporting and feature suggestion tool.