Google Messages update brings “Delete for everyone” and snooze

Google Messages just got a long-overdue upgrade. With the new Google Messages update, users can now unsend RCS messages using a “Delete for everyone” option — a feature we’ve seen for years on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram.

If you’ve ever fired off a typo or sent the wrong message to the wrong group chat, this one’s for you.

RCS chats in Google Messages now support the “Delete for everyone” feature. Long-press a sent message, hit the trash icon, and choose between “Delete for me” or “Delete for everyone.” If you go with the latter, it’ll disappear from both ends of the chat.

That being said, it won’t work for everyone if the recipient is on an older app version. But for most people, it should work as expected. Google’s just catching up here, but at least they’ve done it right.

Also new in the latest Google Messages update is the ability to snooze notifications. You can pause alerts from any chat without muting them completely. Long-press a conversation on the main screen, tap the snooze icon, and choose how long to pause notifications: 1 hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, or indefinitely. Nobody in the chat will know, and your thread gets grayed out so it’s easy to spot later.

Beyond that, Google added a few minor quality-of-life improvements. You can now change your group chat avatar, and the new chat screen makes it easier to spot whether a conversation is using RCS. Little touches, but they help.