An incredible milestone for the Google Messages app

The hamburger button, the menu icon, the drawer icon, the drawer navigation button, the three-line button… you name it, this button is no longer in the Google Messages app. It's part of a revamp of Google's Messages home screen, which a handful of users had the chance to try out last June. Now the change is part of the official version of the app and available to all users (a manual update may be required).

The UI change has been in beta testing for a few months now, and the tests seem to have been encouraging, at least by Google's standards. Otherwise, we're sure Google would have postponed the release of the update.

Until now, when you opened the Google Messages app, there was a search box at the top of the screen. The redesigned home screen now displays (from left to right) four elements. The first two items are not clickable and are on the left side of the screen. It's the Google logo icon and the Messages title.

On the right side is a magnifying glass icon, which performs the function of the previous search box. The last element is the profile avatar button, which opens the application menu. Here you can now find Archived, Spam & Blocked, Mark All as Read and Connect Device, as well as options to manage your account and access general app settings.

Let's go back to the magnifying glass icon for a moment. When you tap it, the old search box appears on the new screen with eight filters for more precise searches: “Unread, Known, Unknown, Starred, Images, Videos, Places and Links”. Another change is that the message organizing feature has been removed. The tabs at the top for “All, Personal and Business sections” are gone, but the “Automatically delete OTPs (one-time password messages) after 24 hours” option remains in Settings.

The Messages app had a billion downloads on the Google Store before the pandemic. At the time, the app was not pre-installed on Android phones (the exception was Pixel phones). Samsung and some other manufacturers have since adopted this app as the default. Since the pandemic, they have thus managed to reach a record number of 5 billion installations.