GIF Revolution
Good news for GIF-lovers! As of today, you can send and download GIFs up to 20x faster. This is possible because we're now re-encoding all GIFs to mpeg4 videos that require up to 95% less disk space for the same image quality.
We've optimized our apps so that they can smoothly play even dozens of GIFs on the screen at the same time. GIFs will now play automatically, so there's no need to launch each one manually anymore. (You can turn this off in Settings when you need a break.)
Sending GIFs
To make sending your favorite animations easier, we've added a dedicated GIF tab to the sticker panel. Tap on GIFs in chats (long tap on iOS) and ‘Save’ to add them to the panel. Then send them to any chat in one tap.
iOS users can now also send GIFs from the Gallery using the fully redesigned attachment menu.
GIF Bot
Last but not least, our new Inline Bots feature offers another innovative way of finding and sharing GIFs. These bots deserve a separate blog post.
The Telegram Team,
January 4, 2016