When someone posts a link, Telegram generates a link preview with title, media and some of the text from the page linked. Ever since the October 2023 update, clicking or tapping anywhere inside the preview box opens the link. This means you can't open, expand, zoom or seek some media (images, videos, gifs) from the preview anymore. Allow media to be opened simply when clicked or tapping directly on the media, instead of assuming what the user wants to do. Users have enough intelligence to know to click the colored, underlined link (which is standard UX everywhere) if they want to open the link itself. If you dont want this to be the default, then at least add a setting for it.
Every update Telegram keeps adding something new instead of just solidifying what it already has and slowly becoming an ugly lagging mess. The premium update was terrible, but at least it made sense - they need money to keep going. But this update is one big disaster that I have no idea how to justify.
are there any good alternative clients? telegram by removing the ability of opening media from preview is realy pushing me away from this update, are there any way to downgrade a client?
For example, Telegram X for Android or Unigram for Windows. Although all of the alternative ones are missing some features, so it will be a compromise either way.
Gotriss
I wonder if telegram got a call from YouTube, Twitter and other platforms forcing them to make links redirect to their apps instead of bypassing them/show within the app. Cos it makes no sense that they'd implement this willingly. But given their current streak of mistakes I wouldn't put it past them to change perfectly fine features just because they wanted to add chaos (or later sell it as a premium feature).
Ever since they did the whole premium thing telegram has been devolving as an app. What a shame. Enshittification of the internet is truly everywhere.
That option was also on Desktop... and now it's also gone.
chip
This is first telegram update that's been so bad and detrimental to my experience that I went out of my way to find this feedback forum to complain about it. There's no reason to remove so much functionality to make it ever so slightly easier to click on something that I never had issues clicking on in the first place, despite making it significantly easier to accidentally open a malicious link. Best of all, you just can't view full bluesky images anymore because clicking on the image takes you to the login page. This behavior is painful and makes me want to try to find a third-party client.
Glad I am not alone in this. Luckyly I disabled autoupdates just in time on mobile and I was able to downgrade on desktop. Now I am just checking daily if they reverted this.
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Ever since they did the whole premium thing telegram has been devolving as an app. What a shame. Enshittification of the internet is truly everywhere.