DealNTech Mobiles, PCs, and All Things Tech
Google Messages or Messages is an instant messaging app developed by Google. It was made for Android and WearOS operating systems. It also has a web app available for Windows users. The messages app supports SMS and RCS (Rich communication services), and starting this year, RCS is enabled by default on all supported Android devices.
However, according to 9to5google, the app is losing some key features. Previously, there used to be a feature to long press on a message to a set reminder. The feature had a choice with several presets or launching a full-fledged date and time picker. However, now, some users in the beta program have found this feature missing. The affected users say the alarm icon in the toolbar is missing.
However, the affected users still have the “Remind 1hr” option in the incoming notifications and related toggle. People often use the reminders feature for business purposes, and this bug is infuriating. For some others, Magic Compose is missing entirely.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the end of the list. Some users have also reported missing Google Photos integration in the app. Before the disappearance, It was above the aforementioned “Remind 1hr” setting. This feature allowed users to upload media to the cloud and send them as links. This feature helped share high-quality photos and videos, which SMS/MMS didn’t allow. The Google Photos integration app has had reliability problems for a while.
Many believe that Google intentionally made these changes. But these may be just bugs or glitches. It doesn’t make sense that Google removes the reminder setting only from one place but lets it stay in another. The Google Photos feature is handy, too, and using RCS for high-quality media is a temporary workaround. But with the older feature, you could share the media without any compression.
Google’s current testing of the new Noise cancellation and Markdown text support features might cause such problems. Another reason why the removals are unlikely is because of the helpfulness of these features. Many users use these daily to make their workflow more efficient. Because of Google’s recent AI feature additions, the Google Messages text field has a lot of clutter at the moment. It’s likely that since this app is getting a redesign, Google will also redesign the Google Photos app. Because of this, some features could go missing for a while.
However, we must note that Google previously removed useful features like these. Recently, they removed the “View messages by category” option, which many people used. This feature helps in filtering personal and business messages.
