Google Messages is making it easier to work with media in chats
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Earlier this year, Google Messages started working on threaded replies for media in conversations.
- The app is now developing the ability to directly swipe from one media item to another.
- You can also access all the media from a conversation in the chat’s detail view.
Google’s been making some big strides when it comes to modernizing texting on Android over the course of the past year or so, and the cross-platform adoption of RCS has really been driving a lot of that change. With RCS support for high-quality images in chats, we were excited earlier this year when we spotted development work towards letting you reply to media like pictures or videos in a thread. Now we’re checking out a further tweak that could make it easier to deal with a whole bunch of media all in one conversation.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We’re cracking open Google Messages version messages.android_20250528_04_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic for this preview, and although this interface isn’t yet something you can try out for yourself, we’ve managed to get the app to show a new swipe-based reply view in operation:
Before, we had to tap on a media item to first bring it up, at which point we could react to it or hit the chat button in the bottom-left to view the thread attached to it. But if we wanted to turn our attention to another piece of media from the conversation, we had to back out to the discussion first. With this WIP interface, you instead get the ability to quickly move between entries with this media view with just an easy swipe.
At first blush, that doesn’t feel like a particularly impactful change, but when you start piling up a lot of media in one conversation (like those meme-packed group chats you can’t seem to stay away from), it starts becoming clear just where the utility here really lies. Anytime you like while scrolling through this carousel, you can pause for a moment and dive into one of the threads attached to the media.
In addition to being able to swipe through all your media there, you can also view chat details to access a database of all media present:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
As with any in-development UI change, Google may very well continue to further tweak how this works before releasing it to the public — assuming it even gets that far. We’ll keep looking into further Messages releases to see if we can spot any additional changes to how the app works with photos and videos in conversations.
