5 features I want to see on Google Messages as a long time user

I’m a creature of habit — when I find something I like, I tend to stick with it. I’m not ashamed to pick favorites, whether it’s primarily keeping a Google Pixel in my pocket (when I can) or a Garmin GPS watch on my wrist. The same goes for apps — especially ones I use daily for things like messaging and checking the weather. While I’m currently deciding on a new favorite weather companion (thanks to the debut of Google’s Pixel Weather), I’ve trusted the same messaging platform for years: Google Messages. It’s been my mainstay across Google Pixels, Samsung Galaxy devices, and even my time on the Motorola Razr and OnePlus Open.

And yet, I know that Google Messages isn’t perfect. I know that you have to give up a few features if you switch from Samsung Messages to Google Messages, and I know that it simply doesn’t work on iOS. But, in the spirit of growth, I think that my favorite messaging app could stand to learn from its competitors. Here are five things I think Google Messages should copy and paste.

First, I’d love for Google to pull sticker creation from Apple’s iMessage. Yes, it’s a silly feature, but I’ve found it to be a useful one. If a friend sends you an image over iMessage, you can simply press and hold on the subject, wait for a wave-like effect to run across the screen, and turn it into a sticker — it’s that easy. Then, you can save that sticker and add an effect, like a thick outline or a shiny finish that looks like the reflective stickers teachers handed out in school.

Once you’ve built up a little library of stickers, you can start using them to respond to messages, much like if you were laughing at or liking a message. I’ve switched almost entirely from emoji reactions to stickers — there’s just something funnier about reacting with the likeness of someone you know. Granted, it doesn’t have to be someone you know — Apple will let you make stickers out of memes, cartoons, and just about anything else, and it has pretty good edge detection, too.

For what it’s worth, Google Messages supports a Photomoji feature — I just think Apple’s version is better. Google Messages will let you pick a photo from your library and select a subject to send, but it doesn’t save its stickers quite as nicely. Where iMessage will save your sticker with its original outline for reactions, Google seems to compress its stickers into a small circle, making them all uniform in shape but much more challenging to see.

If I were Google, I would at least consider copying Apple’s freeform sticker borders and probably adding the optional effects, too. It’s far more enjoyable to create and send a sticker in iMessage than in Google Messages.

I’ve also realized that even though Google might be my go-to search engine, it doesn’t have the best approach to searching through your old messages. Right now, when you type in a keyword to search for it in Google Messages, you can only see a small part of each message containing the term, making it much harder to pick out the context you’re looking for. Sure, you’ll get plenty of results, but you might spend just as long tapping back and forth between them.

So, I think Google needs to revamp its search feature to match Samsung Messages. It might not show as many results at any one time, but Samsung Messages pulls up each message in its entirety so you can check the context of what you’re searching for. Otherwise, the two messaging platforms offer the same searchability — putting a search button within the settings of each chat — Google just needs to refine its results. And, now that Samsung is moving away from its own messaging platform in favor of Google Messages, I’d like to see some of those features live on and make life better across other versions of Android, too.

Of course, any search feature beats Apple’s current approach to search within Messages — you just can’t do it.

Up next, Google needs to earn its digital green thumb. Both Apple and Samsung currently store your deleted messages in a virtual recycling bin, and I would love for Google Messages to do the same. After all, I like to keep a clean inbox, which often means accidentally deleting a recipe I asked my mom for or purging event information like where to be and when to be there in the name of managing my messages. While the easy answer is probably for me to learn not to do that, I’d like to see Google give me some digital backup, too.

And yes, I know that you can already archive conversations as part of Google Messages, but I seldom think to do so. They either exist in my inbox or get deleted — I’m bound to forget about a third location like an archive. A recycling bin, however, exists in a not-quite-deleted capacity, so I’d only be able to rescue messages for 30 days or so. It’s the same approach that Google’s rivals take, and I have to imagine that if I don’t need something within that month-long period, it probably wasn’t that important to start with.

Heading back to iMessage, I think Google should reclaim its rightful place as the king of extensions. Right now, Google Messages is pretty straightforward, allowing you to attach GIFs, images, files, and other things when sending a message. It’s a good setup that pales compared to Apple’s optional extensions. As it stands, you can attach all of the above when sending an iMessage, but you can also send polls to your friends while planning an event, send flight information from your airline of choice, or even play games with fellow iPhone-toting friends.

Honestly, I never thought that last one — the ability to send games back and forth — would be the feature to push me over the edge, but here we are. I was pushed into installing GamePigeon by a few friends, and it’s become an easy way to pass the time with head-to-head versions of Cup Pong, 8 Ball Pool, and a naval warfare game that looks suspiciously like Battleship. Is it a useful extension in my daily life? Not really, but it makes sitting at the DMV waiting for an appointment go by much faster.

Perhaps I’m so surprised Google Messages doesn’t currently support extensions because I always think of Google as the king of add-ons. It’s so easy to add different extensions to fine-tune your Chrome experience, whether fixing your writing with Grammarly or managing logins with LastPass, that it only seems natural for Google to make them more portable. In fact, Google doesn’t offer extensions as part of its mobile Chrome experience, either, so maybe it just needs to embrace them across the board. It would certainly give Google Messages more flexibility — hopefully with more useful features than my favorite little games.

And finally, Google needs to lean on one of its old taglines — be together, not the same. As it stands, every conversation you have in Google Messages looks the same. The app will follow your default device theme — either light or dark — but that’s about as fun as it gets. I’d like to see Google embrace a little bit of color and pick up the different color options you get in Samsung Messages.

See, Samsung doesn’t just let you choose between light and dark — you can customize your conversations with a few different color profiles, change the opacity of your chat bubble, and even set a unique image for the background of any conversation. Doing that in Google Messages would make life so much easier, simply because I could put someone’s face as the background of their conversation and never have to worry about texting the wrong person again.

Unfortunately, Samsung Messages doesn’t let you change the colors of the chat bubbles themselves, which means that every message comes from a green bubble. I’m not sure if I’d like to see Google add that flexibility or if it’s safer to trust it to pick a color that’s visible across all of its backgrounds. However, changing from a boring black or white background is a must.

At the end of the day, maybe Google will listen to me and breathe new life into Google Messages, but then again, maybe it won’t. Either way, it has me locked in thanks to its position as the default messaging app across most of the Android landscape.