Suggested by @avonakina, "How 3 design students took on a challenge of improving Telegram — https://medium.com/@prodlenkatelegram/design-case-study-how-to-increase-the-use-of-telegram-2b324be3875b"

We keep receiving a lot of great works in the UI design contest. However, some of the submissions ignore one or more of these three recommendations:

1. UI mockups that are night theme only are not sufficient for the contest. We understand that dark designs look cooler on demos. But the default theme on Telegram, as well as in both mobile operating systems, is bright. Make sure you upload a day mode layout together the night mode one.

2. UI mockups can be original when it comes to transitions and choice of colors, but departing too far from the default layouts and icons of the operating system can result in less intuitive UIs. A UI is intuitive when it reuses most of the language (icons, colors, layouts) that is already familiar to the user from the default apps (like the UI of standard calls).

3. UI mockups should fit naturally into the existing Telegram app design. If the rest of the Telegram app is utilizing icons, behaviors or fonts that are noticeably different from those used in your mockup, it may result in a visible lack of consistency. If you’d rather redesign the rest of the Telegram app in accordance with your calls UI mockup, you can do that, but in this case we’ll expect the mockups of all the other relevant screens of Telegram from you.

Those recommendations may seem obvious to most professional designers who daily deal with UI integrity and intuitivity. However, many talented but less experienced designers may benefit from adhering to these principles. The art of the UI design is finding balance between the already known and the new, between the standard and the original.

Participants of the bonus stage are now welcome to start submitting their apps. Please follow the steps below:

1. Start @jobs_bot and choose Telegram Fixes Contest.
2. Upload your APK for Android, IPA for iOS, or a link to your Github Telegram fork for React JS. Don’t forget to deploy your JS app to GitHub Pages as described here.
3. Once you’re done uploading, a dedicated page on the contest platform will be assigned to your app. Until the deadline, only you will be able to view this page.
4. Make sure you’re logged in on the contest platform and open your app’s page using the link provided by @jobs_bot.
5. Create an issue for each of the fixes you implemented in the Telegram app. Describe the fix in the comment for the issue and attach videos/images showing the app before and after the fix. If the fix is available as a separate pull request on GitHub, please add a link to it in the description of the fix.

You may reupload your app using @jobs_bots or edit the descriptions of your fixes on the contest platform until the deadline on June 23, 2019 (11:59PM CET).

For iOS, please follow this instruction to obtain the .IPA:

1. Sync with the Telegram repository on Github.
2. Install fastlane if you haven't already:

brew cask install fastlane

3. In your project folder run

export PATH="$HOME/.fastlane/bin:$PATH"
sh buildbox/guest-build-telegram.sh verify-local

4. Once the build is ready (should take 20-30 minutes), the current folder will contain the file Telegram-iOS-AppStoreLLC.ipa

Another take on folders / tags / categories of chats:

We will stop accepting submissions for the coding contest in about 12 hours from now. We enabled the participants to edit the descriptions of the issues they created until the deadline.

Some participants were worried that their github fixes might be copied by other contestants before the deadline of the competition.

Note that you may keep your changes private until the deadline and push them to your forked repository when the submission period is over. If you do this, please attach the SHA-1 hashes of your commits to your contest submission.

We received 168 submissions for the Voice Calls visualization competition. We will go through all the submissions and will publish the best works here. The prize budget will be increased, although the competition will remain high.

As a result of the June coding contest we received 7 Telegram forks for Android (105 fixes in total), 7 apps for iOS (43 fixes) and another 6 Telegram forks in JS (160 fixes in total).

We've just had a quick look at the Android submissions and are excited by what we've seen so far. We are looking forward to viewing the rest.

In the next week we'll be deciding how the 100,000$+ prize fund will be divided among the 20 participants.