- Google is once again enabling users to set names and profile pictures for their contacts in Google Messages
- The app switched to a social-media style profile system in 2024
- Profile sharing is seemingly still available
Google has announced that users of its Messages app will once again be able to set names and photos for their contacts after the app switched to a social media profile-style system in 2024.
As 9to5Google notes, profile sharing (originally named profile discovery) was rolled out to Messages users from March 2024, replacing the names and contact images ascribed to a user’s contacts with information from their contacts’ Google accounts.
Following this, Google implemented the "customize how you are seen" page in Messages, an unskippable process that leaned even more heavily into a social platform style of self-presentation.
Though the decision to make profile sharing the only way to set names and contact photos has been reversed, users can seemingly still opt to use their contacts’ preferred information – there's no indication that profile sharing has been ditched entirely.
Customizing a contact’s information is, as one might expect, fairly straightforward: you simply tap the name or photo of a contact within the chat, opening a page containing the user’s details, which can then be manually updated.
The addition of profile sharing was originally announced in November 2023, and may be viewed as part of Google’s efforts to present a functionally similar rival to Apple’s iMessage.
As we previously reported, the gap between the two platforms is beginning to narrow with Apple’s adoption of RCS – Rich Communication Services – a standard that allows for easy media sharing and group chats similar to its own iMessage standard.
Google has long championed RCS as a forward-thinking and collaborative standard, and even publicly celebrated its rival’s decision to implement RCS on iPhone.
Furthermore, the end of 2024 saw a crop of new messaging tools come to Google’s default messaging app designed to protect users from scammers and spammers, such as warnings about dangerous links, blur filters for unsavory images, and better contact verification.
It’s clear that Google is keen to make Messages the texting app of choice for Android users – it seems part of that is letting people use mugshots of their friends and family as profile photos.
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