- Google is once more permitting customers to set names and profile footage for his or her contacts in Google Messages
- In 2024, the app transitioned to a social media-style profile system
- Profile sharing is outwardly nonetheless attainable
Google has introduced that customers of its Messages app will be capable of set names and images for his or her contacts once more in 2024 after the app switches to a social media profile system.
As 9to5Google notes, Profile Sharing (initially referred to as Profile Discovery) rolled out to Messages customers beginning in March 2024, changing the names and call footage related to a consumer's contacts with data from their contacts' Google Accounts.
Google then carried out the “Customise How You Are Appeared” web page in Messages, a non-skippable course of that leaned much more carefully into the fashion of self-expression on social platforms.
Though the choice to make profile sharing the one approach to set names and call images has been reversed, customers can apparently nonetheless select to make use of their contacts' most well-liked data – there isn’t any indication that profile sharing can be phased out completely grew to become.
Customizing contact data is fairly straightforward, as you'd anticipate: you merely faucet a contact's title or photograph in chat, opening a web page with consumer particulars, which might then be up to date manually.
The addition of profile sharing was initially introduced in November 2023 and might be seen as a part of Google's efforts to current a functionally related competitor to Apple's iMessage.
As we beforehand reported, the hole between the 2 platforms is beginning to slender as Apple introduces RCS (Wealthy Communication Companies) – a regular that permits straightforward media sharing and group chats just like its personal iMessage commonplace.
Google has lengthy championed RCS as a forward-thinking and collaborative commonplace, and even publicly celebrated its competitor's choice to implement RCS on the iPhone.
As well as, quite a few new messaging instruments had been built-in into Google's default messaging app in late 2024 to guard customers from scammers and spammers, comparable to warnings about harmful hyperlinks, blur filters for offensive photographs, and higher contact verification.
It's clear that Google is fascinated by making Messages the texting app of alternative for Android customers – this apparently consists of permitting folks to make use of mugshots of their family and friends as profile images.