TL;DR
- Google has finally announced that custom icon support for RCS group chats will soon be available in Google Messages.
- The company has also confirmed that Google Messages will soon allow users to snooze chats.
- In addition, the messaging app will clearly label contacts with RCS enabled.
Although Google has been working on adding custom icon support to RCS group chats in Google Messages for quite some time, the feature has yet to reach users. We first spotted references to the feature in a teardown late last year and gave you an early look at it this February. Last month, Google Messages started testing custom icon support in RCS group chats with a few users. Now, Google has confirmed that the feature will soon reach all users.
Google announced a couple of new Android ecosystem updates alongside the Android 16 stable release today. These include a few upcoming changes for Google Messages, including custom icon support in RCS group chats. The feature will allow users to change the icon for existing RCS group chats and give them the option to choose a custom icon when setting up a new group chat.
In addition to custom icon support, Google has confirmed that the messaging app will receive two more useful improvements we spotted earlier this year: notification snoozing and RCS tags for contacts. The notification snoozing feature will let users temporarily mute notifications for specific chats. Although Google’s blog post doesn’t share more details, we’ve previously seen that this feature will allow users to snooze notifications for 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, or always.
Chats with snoozed notifications will show a clock icon on the home screen and a pop-up highlighting the snooze duration within the chat. The feature will also give users the option to allow notifications from snoozed group chats if they’re @mentioned in the chat.
The RCS tags feature will add a tag next to contacts with RCS enabled, making it easier for users to tell whether they’re starting an RCS chat or sending a regular SMS. The feature will also work for contacts with multiple numbers, and only show the tag next to the number that has RCS enabled.
Google has not shared a release timeline for these new Google Messages features, but we expect them to roll out in the coming days. We’ll update this post as soon as they’re widely available.
