Google Messages Adds Snooze and Delete Features

These two features Google Messages’ “Delete for everyone” feature are only available in RCS chats.

Rich Communication Services, or RCS chat, is an advanced messaging protocol that offers a more loaded with functions and comprehensive chatting experience than SMS and MMS.

Last week, Google had revealed a number of new features for its Messages app, such as the ability to snooze notifications and remove text messages from RCS chats for all participants. Stable users will now have widespread access to these features. The former allows you to snooze incoming message notifications, as the names imply. In the meanwhile, the latter, like WhatsApp’s current feature, removes texts for all conversation participants. The erased texts might still be visible to users of older versions of the Google Messages app, though.

Google Messages’ “Delete for everyone” feature has been in the works for a few months. The tech giant made the app available to beta customers the following month after it was discovered in the code back in February. The Google Messages app now makes it largely available.

Delete for everyone and Delete for me are now the two options that appear when you long press on a message and then tap the trash button. The former takes it off of the device of both the sender and the recipient, the receiver.

Google has also added the ability to snooze notifications to the Messages app. From the app’s home screen, long pressing on a chat opens a new window with the various time periods displayed. Users have the option to snooze conversational notifications for one hour, eight hours, twenty-four hours, or always.

The chosen time or date will then show underneath the chat, which will be grayed out. According to Google, other participants won’t know that you’ve turned off chat notifications. To undo snooze, users can redo the instructions.

The tech giant has also revealed personalization for RCS group conversations, allowing users to designate a personalized icon and unique moniker for the chats as part of the June 2025 Google Messages upgrade.

RCS group conversations can be renamed, and the 2×2 circular grid of profile avatars can be changed to a custom icon. You have the option of using Google Illustrations or uploading your own image.

Last but not least, the new chat page (version 20250528_00_RC00) now displays RCS status with a label to the right with a distinct and dynamic colour theming for stable users.

All things considered, we all want to believe that these changes will make Google Messages even more competitive, gradually catching up to other well-known platforms like iMessage. These new features are a step toward making Google Messages more adaptable and user-friendly, whether you’re attempting to recover from an unaware message, temporarily mute a conversation, or add a more personal touch to your group chats.