Summary
- Google Messages beta hints at a soon-to-arrive “join via link” feature, potentially helping users join group chats with a URL.
- Some other changes spotted in the beta include a familiar card-style design for the contact selection within the message forwarding menu.
- Google is adopting system colors for the icons in the Messages app’s profile info page, while also making it easier to report GIFs.
Google Messages gets a lot of things right, but it hasn’t quite caught up to some of the other messaging apps in terms of feature additions. It now looks like yet another feature that’s been missing from Google’s messaging app is about to land, based on early evidence spotted within a beta version.
Related
Starting WhatsApp video calls from Google Messages could soon be a thing
Interoperability? Not in the truest sense
Thanks to reporting by Android Authority, we’re learning about a new activity called “join via link” in the Messages app. The site found this new activity within the app’s beta (version 20250311_01_RC00), though it’s seemingly not functional yet.
Although the screenshot provided by Android Authority (shown above) doesn’t say what it does, it’s a safe guess that this is related to joining a group chat in Messages with a link/URL. If implemented, this would be a major step up over the current group chat joining experience in the Messages app that requires users to manually add participants.
Sticking with group chats, the site found a new pencil icon on the group info page, presumably to change the group’s display image. Google has been working on letting users add images of their choice to group chats since December, with evidence of this also appearing more recently.
A bunch of other tweaks have appeared
Current vs upcoming (via Android Authority)
Further, Messages is working on a card-style design for the message forwarding menu’s contact selection page, with each contact housed within a card. Users will see the frequently contacted people under Recent conversations followed by the alphabetical list of contacts, similar to the current arrangement. This is reminiscent of the recently spotted redesign of the Start chat page.
Current vs upcoming (via Android Authority)
Google Messages also wants to spice things up on the profile info page, with the four icons just below the contact image (voice call, video call, contact, and search) adopting the system color in this beta update.
The last update spotted within this Messages beta is the ability to report a GIF from the app. GIFs can be accessed in Messages by tapping the ‘+’ icon to the left of a conversation’s text field. With this upcoming change, long pressing any GIF from this extensive list will display the option to report it.
As with most early feature discoveries, there’s no guarantee that either will appear in the stable version of Messages anytime soon. But given how crucial some of these additions can be, especially the join via link feature, we hope to see them on the messaging app sooner rather than later.
