Google Messages Update: Delete for All and Snooze Notifications Arrive

Google Messages is rolling out new features, including message deletion for all participants and notification snoozing, enhancing user control over conversations. These updates bring the app closer to the functionality of other messaging platforms, offering users more flexibility in managing their messages and notifications.

Message Management Upgrades

A key update allows users to delete messages not just from their own view, but from the entire chat for all participants. To do this, users tap and hold a sent message within an RCS chat and select the trash icon. Then, the option to delete the message for everyone appears, as demonstrated by the 9TO5Google portal.

This enhancement significantly improves how users handle their messages, finally catching up with features that have been available on platforms like WhatsApp and Signal for years.

Notification Snoozing Introduced

Another significant addition is the ability to postpone notifications. Users can long-press a selected conversation in the Google Messages home screen. An alarm icon will then appear, providing an interface to choose how long to mute notifications from the conversation.

Users can select from options like one hour, eight hours, or 24 hours, or even disable notifications until they’re manually re-enabled. Importantly, the other participants in the conversation won’t be informed about the notification silence.

Additional Improvements

Group conversations also get a refresh; they can now be renamed. Also, users can upload their own picture to the group conversations, in place of default avatars, or utilize images from the Google Illustrations library. A recent survey by Statista revealed that 78% of smartphone users utilize messaging apps regularly (Statista 2024).

The latest update also introduces RCS status indicators directly in the dialog to start a new conversation, which will save time when selecting the appropriate communication method. The entire application’s look more closely resembles the Material You style thanks to Dynamic Color support.

These updates reflect Google’s ongoing effort to refine its messaging platform and offer more robust features.