Google Messages RCS group chats could soon allow more customization

Key Takeaways

• Google Messages advocates RCS adoption, but app devs still have liberties with the UI.
• New beta build reveals potential support for custom group chat icons
• Custom icons could make identifying group chats easier, aligning with WhatsApp and Telegram features.

Google has stood by Messages and advocated strongly for RCS adoption across other popular chat apps, with Apple's iMessage being the latest noteworthy outlier to add support. However, RCS is merely a protocol and its implementation largely depends on the app developers. Google's app still lacks several quality-of-life bits, but a new beta build reveals at least one of these issues might go away soon — group chat icons.

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In its current state, Google Messages automatically creates an icon for RCS group chats using a grid of the users' initials or profile pictures. In a long list of active chats, icons like that can be hard to identify, especially if you're a participant in multiple groups or people are regularly added and removed from said conversations.

Thankfully, app researcher AssembleDebug tells Android Authority that beta version 20241127_00_RC00 of Messages contains evidence of support for custom group chat icons. If the feature goes live, users should be able to replace the standard grid with a custom image, just like all other messaging apps have allowed for years now.

A convenience we didn't realize we needed

Coming soon, hopefully

While this might seem like a trivial change, you might find it easier to identify group chats just by their custom icon once this feature rolls out. It's also a sign that Google's developers are interested in keeping the company's suite of apps up to speed with contemporaries like WhatsApp and Telegram.

However, this is still a code-based sighting in a beta version of the app, so there's no reliable way to tell when we might see it in the stable build. Moreover, several details about the implementation are also up in the air, such as if only admins would have permissions to change the group icons or if all participants could. iOS support for group chat icons is also unclear. Hopefully, we will have all the answers soon.