Google Messages Takes Step Closer to Letting You Edit Messages

It wasn’t long ago that our world was filled with so many quick-sent typos because of the combination of our hastily put-together words, keyboards on ego trips with aggressive autocorrect, and apps lacking the ability to edit them. Twitter was the most notorious of the situations, because misspellings in Tweets were so common that it became a running joke. We’ve seen since edit features come to services like that, as well as Telegram. It looks now like Google Messages is close to rolling the feature out.

By tinkering with a recent build of Google Messages, flags have been enabled by TheSpAndroid that allowed for message editing to take place. A long-press on a message brings up an edit bar at the top of Google Messages, with one button letting you edit the contents of a message. It’s about as straight-forward of a process as you can imagine.

At some point, assuming Google really is preparing to roll this out in the near future, we should see message history included, so that folks can see exactly what you’ve edited in your conversations. This is a key addition to message editing on all platforms, as it at least gives people notice if you’ve changed something and also shows what it is you needed to change. It’s important because history can be meaningful, especially if context or proof of someone’s words needs to be retrieved. For your typos, it is what it is.

At the moment, it sounds like Google is very much still working on this. When currently editing messages, they are sent twice rather than as a single message that’s edited and has history. That’s because both parties would need message editing in their Messages client. And yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Since this isn’t live and is still a behind-the-scenes feature, we can’t tell you to go looking for it just yet. It could rollout in the beta of Google Messages first, so feel free to enroll in that (here). My guess is we’ll see a feature like this as a part of the next Android feature drop that could show up any day. It feels like we’re due for one.

Google Play Link: Google Messages

// TheSpAndroid