Google Messages is set to take a page out of Gmail’s book

When talking about email, I’m likely to go down a rabbit hole discussing why it is I miss Google’s own Inbox so much. Gmail is fine, sure, but Inbox was fantastic once you understood how to leverage it. The winning formula largely came down to giving users a quick and simple way to parse and triage email with just a few gestures. While not exactly what Inbox did, Gmail does possess the ability to quickly dismiss or delete emails in your inbox with quick, swiping actions; and I love it very much.

I wish it weren’t this way, but the truth is most email that hits my inbox needs to be archived or deleted so I can get to the stuff that really matters and deserves my attention. Gmail gives me a simple way to do this with left and right swipes that allow me to either delete or archive messages very quickly. No extra taps or prompts are necessary and a quick gesture takes care of two of my most-used actions in my inbox.

Swiping only archives in Google Messages

In Google Messages, a similar feature was introduced quite some time ago to allow users to archive individual messages with a simple swipe. The only issue? This action only archives your message and doesn’t actually delete it. I don’t know about you, but I delete far more messages than I archive, so this gesture isn’t wildly helpful to me at the moment. After all, I don’t want to archive and save text messages for things like 2-factor authentications, spam, and reservation confirmations. I just want those deleted.

In a coming update, 9to5 Google has uncovered the fact that Google Messages will give users the option to not only archive messages from this gesture, but delete them as well. In a similar fashion to Gmail, you’ll have the option to archive or delete messages depending on your swipe direction or you’ll be able to disable the whole thing as well. Again, like Gmail, you’ll get to choose which direction triggers which action and you’ll be able to disable one swipe or both swipes as well.

I’d wager this will be a huge productivity boost to anyone using Google Messages. Being able to quickly sort, archive and delete messages with basic gesture support will go a long way towards cleaning things up in your messages inbox. Additionally, bringing messaging apps of all kinds into better alignment with similar functionality and gesture support only makes good sense, so it is great to see Google moving in this direction with Messages. Hopefully we’ll see this feature rolled out soon.