Get a little control over your swipes
Today, life on Android is all about convenience and familiarity. Tech giants like Google are trying (or so we like to think) to ensure all their apps look cohesive and work similarly. It is perhaps for this reason Google is finally bringing the Gmail app’s old customizable swipe actions to the latest Messages beta.
With Gmail you have a lot of different options, and can swipe to snooze emails, mark them read or unread, archive them, or delete them when you swipe left or right (personally, I’m a fan of left-to-delete and right-for-mark-as-read). Currently, the stable build of Messages only archives a message, whether you swipe left or right on it.
But that’s now changing, at least for beta testers, and the latest Messages build starts to give users the option to configure different behavior for swipes (via 9to5Google). Both left and right swipes are customizable, but you can only pick from two actions — deleting the thread or archiving it — as well as just doing nothing all. While it wasn’t accessible at the time, we first saw evidence for this feature’s development back in June, and can now check it out in action.
Considering how ubiquitous swiping to perform actions has become across so many different apps, it’s great to see Google taking a little time to invest in making sure that those we find in Messages are as useful as possible. Like we mentioned, if you’d rather not deal with this at all (and inadvertently swipe an important conversation into oblivion), the Messages beta allows you to disable actions entirely.
Hopefully it won’t be long before this new option rolls out on the stable channel. If you don’t want to feel left out, join the Messages beta with a few clicks and start swiping up a storm.
