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Google Messages may start letting you reply to images with a thread (APK teardown)
- Google Messages appears to be building support for the ability to comment on media attachments.
- Tapping on media like pics and videos would bring up both emoji reactions and the ability to add a reply.
- Replies in these threads are also visible in the main chat view.
For as long as text messaging has been around, it’s a little surprising to still see regular progress happening on so many different fronts. Last year really pushed RCS into the mainstream as Apple started giving access to iPhone users, at least beginning to chip away at the communication gulf that existed between Android and iPhone texters. Understandably, Google Messages has been evolving as well, and we just stumbled across what could be a very useful new way to communicate that the app may soon offer.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
RCS brought with it a ton of popular changes for Messages, including support for large, high-resolution image attachments and the ability to react to them with emoji. That’s a great start, but as we were digging through Google’s new messages.android_20250115_03_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic update for the Messages app, we managed to unlock some new functionality that lets you create threaded replies to media like pictures and video.
Tap on a picture you’ve shared in the chat, and Messages will present you with some new options at the bottom of your screen. We can now leave reactions directly from this view, rather than long-pressing on the media in the full chat summary. But the bigger news is the ability to comment on pictures like this, and to be able to tap on the conversation icon in the lower-left to view a thread of existing comments.
In this interaction with Gemini you can get a bit of a better look how these replies appear in your primary chat view. Considering how this mode isn’t publicly accessible just yet, we’re not too surprised to see that Gemini fails to properly pick up on contextual questions directly related to media replies, but that feels like exactly the sort of thing Google is going to want to address before it’s anywhere near ready to release this.
Really, there’s a lot that could change before we have any hope of seeing this hit public testing, and what we’ve unlocked here may just be an early stab at the media reply interface. But even if we don’t yet know exactly how it might arrive, we’re still excited to see that this sort of messaging is something that Google is thinking about, and working towards addressing in a future Messages update.