Telegram is launching its own version of Stories, the ephemeral mixed media format made popular by Snapchat and copied by every social media app under the sun.

The chat app's founder and CEO Pavel Durov shared the news in his Telegram channel on Monday.

"For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories," he wrote. According to Durov, the company was initially against adding the feature as Stories are "already everywhere," but changed its mind and decided to listen to its users and launch Stories in the "Telegram way."

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Telegram's version of the Story feature includes granular privacy controls, dual camera support, support for captions, and the ability to set when the Story will expire or to leave it permanently available.

Stories will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful, Durov said, while channels will benefit from more exposure and subscribers once the company launches the ability to repost channel messages to stories.

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According to Durov, even those on Telegram team who opposed the feature have started to appreciate it following internal tests. "We can no longer imagine Telegram without it," he wrote.

Telegram Stories are currently in their "last testing phase" and will become available in early July.