The News tab with the «For you» recommendation feed and the @agent bot connection screen have disappeared from two Telegram betas at once. In Android beta 13.2.0 (7278) from October 31, neither the feed methods, nor the tab texts, nor the agent screens are present, although a week earlier, in 13.2.0 (7254), the News tab replaced the contacts tab there. In the macOS beta, the feed and agent screens disappeared even earlier, on October 30, in build 13.1.0.283418, and did not return in the four builds of October 31, although the underlying code remained. This affects those using beta versions. The builds do not state why they were removed, and the description of the new Android beta makes no mention of it.
What Disappeared in the Android Beta
The public Telegram for Android beta is distributed as a single file at telegram.org/dl/android/apk-public-beta, and each build is announced by the beta channel. Build 7278 was released on October 31 at 22:03 UTC with the following changes: updated widgets, a sidebar for topics in forums (including for bots), in channel direct messages, and in Saved Messages, a formatting button in the input field, and a compact (bubbleless) mode for messages. There is no mention of the feed's removal in it.
Inside the APK (76 MB), there is not a single API schema class related to the feed. The following have disappeared:
- methods
feed.getFeed,feed.getForYou,feed.readFeed,feed.getInterestCategories, andfeed.setInterestCategories— for requesting the feed, recommendations, marking as read, and selecting interests; - feed post types
feedItemMessage,feedItemMessageGroup,feedItemInterestCategories, and theupdateReadFeedupdate; channels.editChannelNews— the method used to add or remove a channel from the feed.
Along with these, the following strings have been removed from the app's interface string table: «For you», «News», «Add to News», «Remove from News», «What are you interested in?», «Save Interests», «No more headlines!», and humorous end-of-feed lines like «Your brain deserves a little vacation». In the same build, the agent's texts also disappeared: «Choose AI Provider», «Add Your AI API key», «Hundreds of models», «Invalid API key», «AI agents are not available yet.» — and the providers type, which the server uses to provide a list of AI providers. Only one thing remains: the server key name agent_bot_ids, by which the client identifies agent bots.
The usual tabs are still present: «Chats» and «Settings» are in the string table, which contains a total of 9,896 different strings.
What Disappeared in the macOS Beta
The macOS beta is distributed via the update feed mac-updates.telegram.org. In build 13.1.0.283417 from October 29, the feed and agent are still present: the binary contains NewsController, NewsForYouFeed, the interests screen, the strings «More of this in For you» and «Remove from News», the agent engine TelegramEngineAgent, the provider AgentProviderOpenRouter, the error AGENT_KEY_INVALID, and the final «You can now use @agent». The application resources include the animations tab_news.tgs and news_drop.tgs.
In 283426 — the last build of October 31 — none of this is present. The count for each of these strings in the binary is zero, the News tab animations are absent from the resources, and the icons for the other tabs — chats, calls, contacts, and settings — are in place. The first build without the feed was 283418 from October 30: its archive is 631 KB smaller than the previous one.
Only the interface was removed. In the shared iOS core TelegramCore, the feed and agent code remained in the same volume: the getFeed request, ForYouFeedContext context, feedMessages and feedItemInterestCategories types, updateReadFeed update, AgentSettingsContext agent settings, and EngineAgentProvider appear the same number of times in 283417 and 283426. For control, strings unrelated to the feed were also checked: ChatListController and transcribeAudioFile also match. On Android, the removal was deeper: feed schema classes are entirely absent from build 7278.
| Platform | Last build with feed tab | First build without it |
|---|---|---|
| macOS, beta | 13.1.0.283417 (Oct 29) | 13.1.0.283418 (Oct 30), then 283423–283426 (Oct 31) |
| Android, beta | 13.2.0 (7260, Oct 27) | 13.2.0 (7278, Oct 31) |
What Arrived in the Same Builds
In the same builds, message widgets gained new features. Android 7278 introduced the userWallet type, widget requests widgetQueryTypeData, widgetQueryTypeSignData, and widgetQueryTypeSentTransaction, and the string «Your wallet is not available on this device.». macOS 283426 gained BotWidgetUserWallet. By names, it appears that the widget will be able to request data signing or transaction sending from the built-in wallet, but this is a reading by names: no screen where this occurs is visible in the builds.
What Remains on Servers and in Open Source Code
In the server response mirrors for both production and test servers, the file with the list of topics feed.getInterestCategories has remained unchanged since October 25 — these are the same nine topics, from AI to inspiration. Whether the server currently responds to this request is not visible from the mirror: it only shows the last received response. The test server configuration for November 1 still contains the agent_bot_ids key with two agent bots, which appeared on October 22.
In the open source code for Telegram for iOS, the feed has not been touched: the last commit in the repository was made on October 28, and the News folder with the feed screens is present there. The feed has been hidden by a build flag there since October 16, and the App Store version as of November 1 is 13.1.2. What is in the latest iOS betas is not visible from open data.
How to Check Your Beta
- Android: The build number is written at the bottom of the settings screen. In 13.2.0 (7254)–(7260), the News tab might have been in place of contacts; in 7278, there is nothing to render it.
- macOS: The build number is in the «About Telegram» window. The feed and agent screens are present in builds up to and including 13.1.0.283417.
- iOS: In the stable version, the News tab has been hidden by a build flag since October 16.
Where This Was Seen Before
The «For you» feed was first discovered in the macOS beta on October 15, and the @agent bot with its own key for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or OpenRouter appeared in it on October 23. The builds of October 30 and 31 are the first since then where neither is visible on screen.
