No more accidental pinching
Google’s aggressive pushing of its Messages app has resulted in its placement as the primary messaging (SMS and RCS) app for many Android phones, not just Pixels. And while it’s pretty good, there are also a few quirks. One of those involves its pinch-to-zoom support, and while that’s technically a feature of the app, not everyone’s a fan of how it works right now. Thankfully, Google is currently testing a toggle to turn it off.
Messages allows you to make texts bigger and more easily readable by just pinching — like you would to zoom in on an image. For some people, that can be legitimately helpful. But if you were sick of accidentally triggering it, the app didn’t provide you with a way to turn it off.
The latest Google Messages beta adds a toggle to disable pinch-to-zoom text in Settings, at least for some. We can confirm that this toggle is currently in an A/B testing stage, and it was also spotted by 9to5Google on a teardown. Once enabled, the app no longer responds to the pinching action to adjust text size. Disabling the toggle will also lock the font size to wherever you had it, so if you’re happy with a particular setting, you can save it that way.
While pinch-to-zoom text in Messages can be genuinely helpful, particularly for users who need visual assistance, for everyone else it’s more likely that the feature is activated accidentally — something which can, and often does, cause confusion. If you want to use this toggle, make sure you’re enrolled in the Google Messages app beta, and that the app is fully up-to-date. You can also better your chances by clearing the app’s cache. Or just wait — it shouldn’t be much longer until it reaches everyone’s phones.
Thanks: Nick
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