3 Big Changes Coming To Google Messages In 2026

Google Messages has been the default messaging app on many Android phones and carriers for years, but that hasn't stopped people from looking for alternatives. Despite Google Messages having such a stranglehold on the messaging ecosystem on Android, the app has been missing out on some much-needed basic features that would make a huge difference to the basic usefulness of the app. Thankfully, Google seems to be aware of at least some of the places that Messages is lacking, and the company appears to have plans to make some changes that will help improve how you and I use Google Messages going forward.

Before we dive too deep into this, it's worth noting that each of these features have either been discovered in beta versions of the Google Messages app through APK teardowns or haven't fully rolled out and are thus considered to be in testing at the moment. That means these features aren't exactly primetime just yet and they could change greatly before Google properly introduces them. Google Messages solved its biggest problem with the introduction of Smart Replies, but this app still felt barebones compared to other messaging apps, including the now-defunct Samsung Messages app. As such, any kind of movement towards expanding the basics is a huge win in my book.

One of the most frustrating features about Google Messages is the sharing menu. Yes, it's super easy to share something with someone else, but if you're trying to share to multiple people, things get finnicky. For one, Messages hasn't been able to tell if you already have existing groups with those people, so if you forget that you have one, you might end up with two or even more. That appears to be changing, though, as one Google Messages user shared screenshots on Reddit of what this change looks like in its most recent iteration at the time of this article's writing. 

After seeing the post, I then checked my own version of Google Messages and found that I have the same functionality. Essentially, when choosing to share something via Google Messages, the app now offers the option to send the content to the contacts as a group or individually. This might seem small, but it's a much-needed change that will ultimately make using Messages to share content much easier.

On top of the changes to the menu itself, the user also noted that Google Messages was now able to tell when you already had a group that existed with the selected users, and that if you tried sending images or videos to RCS and MMS users in a group chat, it will warn you when MMS users are included so that you can remove them and create a separate group for the RCS users.

Another way that Google Messages appears to be changing this year is in how it handles the forwarding of messages. According to an APK teardown from Android Authority, Google has already embedded the code needed to pull this off, and the folks behind the teardown were able to enable multiple image and text forwarding within the app as of the latest beta version of Google Messages. 

Once this feature was enabled, the reporters say they could easily select multiple messages -– including images -– and then make use of a new overflow menu that offered an option to forward all of the messages at once. You can even select the contact that you want to send the messages to and see a preview of the messages before sending them. That part is also new, as the current setup doesn't give you a preview of what you're forwarding, which means any second guessers may need to thumb back to make sure they're forwarding the correct thing.

The feature is still a work in progress, even based on what we're able to see so far. But, considering forwarding messages currently requires you to select a single message and then forward each one individually, I'm going to welcome any kind of move towards something that feels more efficient. Hopefully Google doesn't take a long time to deliver this feature to mainstream users, as I'd love to be able to take advantage of improved forwarding in Google Messages before the end of the year.