XDA Developers has performed a teardown of the latest Google Messages APK for Android, and while these inspections don’t guarantee features will make their way to the masses, they often do. During their adventure, they discovered that the app may soon allow users to pin conversations to the top of their messages for quick access.
Several strings of code that were uncovered explicitly state phrases like ‘Pin to top’, ‘Unpin from top’, and so on. It also seems that there will be a limit to how many conversations can be pinned at a time. Currently, it’s looking like you’ll be capped at three, but it could change. You can’t pin everyone, or that would defeat the purpose, right? Check out the images below from XDA.
Another upcoming feature is the ability to star messages. The distinction here is that pinning will place conversations at the top of your inbox while starring them will not change their order, per se. Instead, it will provide you with a quick reference for which conversations you’ll need to look back on later. I think that a ‘mark as unread’ feature would have been just as effective here, but oh well, at least we still have message snoozing!
I have to say, I’m excited about all that Google Messages has done as of late, but I know a lot of people, myself included, who still don’t have message categories, reactions, and other features that were supposed to roll out almost a year ago. This staged roll out thing that Google is so fond of is killing me, but maybe living on the bleeding edge has a downside – you always know about things much too early and have more time to be impatient.
There’s also no telling when these tools will come to the PWA, and thus, be available to Chromebook users, but usually, there’s not a long disconnect between app and web feature parity – at least, not as much as there used to be. What do you think? Will you use pins and stars when and if they come to Messages? Let’s chat about it below!
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