Google's latest Messages tweak is perfect for your wildest group chats

Summary

Google Messages is enhancing the group chat experience with a swipe-through media viewer.
Users can easily navigate and react to images in chats, improving the overall user experience.
Google is working on several other features for its messaging app, including real-time location sharing and a new delete messages function.

Google Messages is the native text messaging app on Android OS, and it has been steadily growing in popularity in recent years, thanks to its support for the latest RCS (Rich Communication Services) features, such as end-to-end encryption, delivery receipts, and the ability to easily share high-resolution images and videos with friends and family. While it still has some way to go to catch up with other messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp, Google has made significant progress on the app recently to attract more users.

In the past few months, Google has been testing many new features for Google Messages in its beta branch, including sensitive content warnings, real-time location sharing, custom group chat icons, a new mentioning feature, and a ” delete for everyone” message function. All these features promise to add enhanced functionality to Google Messages, making texting much more enjoyable and more in line with the experience users have on other messaging apps.

Now, Google has been found to be working on another new Google Messages feature for group chats, which will make scrolling through all those memes your friends have sent you much easier, by adding the ability to swipe through all the media shared in a conversation easily.

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Swipe through all the memes you’ve been sent in seconds

In Android Authority‘s latest APK teardown of Google Messages, it discovered another new feature being developed for the app that allows you to easily swipe through, react to, and respond to all the different media shared in a group chat or conversation. Currently, in Google Messages, when you open an image someone has sent you, you can only view the images sent in that single message, rather than any images that have been previously sent.

when you open an image, by swiping left, you’ll see all the new images sent, and by swiping right, you can view the older ones.

This new swipe-through media feature will enable you to view all the images sent in a conversation without needing to back out of the current image you’re looking at and spending time scrolling up or down to find a different one. Instead, when you open an image, by swiping left, you’ll see all the new images sent, and by swiping right, you can view the older ones. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll also have the ability to comment on an individual photo or react to it with an emoji. You can see the feature in action in the video above.

Additionally, Google is adding the option to view all media sent in a group chat by going to its chat details and selecting Images. There, you’ll see a history of all the images shared in a group chat, similar to how you can do so on WhatsApp and iMessage.

While this may seem like a minor addition to Google Messages, for people who send and view a lot of media daily, it will make scrolling through them all much less of a hassle.

While this may seem like a minor addition to Google Messages, for people who send and view a lot of media daily, it will make scrolling through them all much less of a hassle. In many of the group chats I have with friends and family, a large number of images (mostly memes) tend to be sent back and forth every day, and if you’re out of the loop for a day, it can be hard to catch up. With this Google Messages feature, once implemented, that will no longer be an issue.

This feature is still in development, so it may take another couple of months before Google rolls it out to all users, but it remains an exciting addition nonetheless. Considering all the other features being developed for Google Messages, Android’s native text messaging app is set for a massive upgrade this year. Hopefully, many of the features we’ve observed in development over the past few months will launch soon.