Much-Needed Changes Are Coming To Google Messages In 2026

Google Messages has been on a tear lately when it comes to new features, which makes a lot of sense considering Samsung shut down its own Messages app on July 6. Clearly, there are some big shoes to fill here, so Google has now been polishing this thing up pretty quickly. While plenty of these tweaks are small on their own, they do add up together.

Some of them change how your chats actually look. One of them, called Chat theme, is a new customization tool that’s been trickling out to beta testers over the past couple of months. Android Authority spotted it tucked inside a late-May build, though as of writing, it hasn’t reached us yet. This one’s pretty comprehensive and lets you change the entire color scheme of the chat — background, bubbles, and all. You can even slap a new wallpaper on, which you can pull out of your own gallery or borrow from Google’s ready-made sets. The catch is that only you ever see the changes. Still, it’s a much-needed addition considering Samsung Messages has had its own for ages, as does Apple’s Messages.

The second major feature is more cross-platform, geared towards making chats with iPhone users more interactive. Despite past updates, RCS chats between Android and iOS still don’t provide the same experience as they would when they’re on the same platform, so these upgrades are a long time coming. The features first arrived with the second iOS 27 developer beta. Let’s take a look at it and more.

When stable iOS 27 arrives, RCS-enabled chats between Android and iPhone will finally get quoted replies and real emoji reactions to photos. Originally, when an iPhone replied to a specific message in an RCS chat, Google Messages wouldn’t show it as a true reply, since support for this didn’t exist on the iOS end. However, when iOS 27 rolls out, the quoted messages would indeed show as quoted messages on the Android end. The same goes for reactions to photos, which will soon work as intended. iOS finally adding proper support for RCS, the modern texting standard that replaced SMS, is what makes both work.

The toolbar that pops up when long-pressing a message is also getting a makeover. Currently, it’s confined to a skinny strip that shows up at the top of the screen, which is a pain to reach one-handed. Soon, it will be replaced by a floating menu that surfaces closer to the message itself. First caught by 9to5Google in a January 2026 beta, it hasn’t rolled out widely.

The more useful change is a new gesture, where swiping left on a thread will show you when it was sent plus the encryption lock. Previously, you had to view this information by tapping individual messages separately. Now, you see the whole thing in a single swipe. To be clear, this is different from the right swipe, which lets you reply to the text. Again, this change is currently in beta and hasn’t been rolled out to all as of writing.

Then there are the changes around sharing. A Reddit user in early July spotted a new tweak where, when you send something to a batch of contacts, you get two buttons at the bottom. One of them lets you fire off the text to each person in their own private thread — which Messages could already do. The problem with this single option was that if you needed to send a single item to one group chat — say an invite to an event you’re planning — you’d have to create that group chat beforehand. Now, a second button beside the “share individually” option labeled “Send to a group” creates a group chat with those selected contacts.

At the same time, Messages is also getting smarter with duplicates. So if a group chat already exists with the same set of contacts you just selected, it drops the text into the existing thread instead – rather than spinning up an identical second one. For now, these changes are reportedly a limited server-side test.

Forwarding is also getting some love. Android Authority dug this out of a beta teardown around the same stretch in early July. Soon, you will be able to forward several messages at once instead of one at a time. You will tick the ones you want (images included), choose where they go, and see a preview of the batch before sending. This cuts out the busywork since forwarding more than a couple of things currently means repeating the whole process for each one.