Google Messages Milestone: 1 Billion RCS Users and 7 New Features Unleashed!

Google Messages App Celebrates 1 Billion Users with 7 New Features

Google has announced that its Messages app now has 1 billion monthly active users, and to celebrate, it is rolling out 7 new features to enhance the user experience. The new features aim to help users express their personality through the app.

The first new feature is Photomoji, which allows users to turn a photo into a reaction using on-device Google AI. These creations can be saved in a special tab for later use, and friends in group chats can also use any Photomoji that is sent.

Voice Moods is another new feature that adds animated emoji to voice messages to visually express the sender’s feelings. In addition, the voice message bitrate and sampling rate have been increased for improved quality.

Screen Effects enable vibrant animations to take over the whole screen when specific messages are typed, such as “it’s snowing” or “I love you”. There are over 15 hidden effects for users to discover.

Custom Bubbles allow users to customize the bubble color and background for their conversations, giving them the ability to personalize their chats.

Reaction Effects inject more life into conversations by animating the ten most popular emoji when they are used to react to a message.

Animated Emoji add visual effects to specific emoji, triggering the effects when the emoji is sent.

Finally, Google Messages now has Profiles, allowing users to personalize their profile name and picture to accompany their phone number, making it easier to identify group chat members.

Unfortunately, these new features will initially be available in the beta version of Messages, and not all of them will be available at once. However, Google has stated that many of these features will be available in the beta channel today, with the hope that they will soon become available in the stable channel.

The announcement comes at a time when Google is heavily promoting the Messages app and the RCS standard as a replacement for traditional SMS and MMS messaging on Android devices. With the addition of these new features, Google is aiming to further enhance the user experience and continue its efforts to make Messages a standout messaging app for Android users.