Watch out, WhatsApp! This feature makes Google Messages a threat

Ever since Google brought RCS to Android phones, Google Messages has slowly gained some new and useful features that make it a better competition for platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. Lately, Google has been blessing its users with a ton of new features, and the company is keeping them coming. Google Messages could soon have a mentions feature for group chats.

Don’t you hate it when you’re in a group chat, and you don’t know how to bring attention to a specific person? This is something that most social media and messaging platforms have solved with mentions. This lets a user call out one person in a group by sending a special notification to that person, highlighting that person’s name, and letting users view their account details. It’s one of the features that your phone’s standard text message platform can benefit from.

Google Messages could soon gain a mentions feature

As useful as this feature sounds, you’ll have to wait some time before you can use it. The folks over at Android Authority have spotted mentions during an APK deep dive. As such, there’s no guarantee that Google will even launch it. The company added code pointing to this feature to the Google Messages app back in March. However, after its latest deep dive (version 20250511 beta), Android Authority was able to get the feature working for the most part.

Just like the mentions feature for other platforms, you’ll see a list of mentionable users when you type the “@” symbol into the text field. When you choose a person to mention, their name will automatically populate in the text field. After you send the message, the person’s name will be highlighted. Tapping on the person’s name will bring up their profile photo with the little toolbar with the message (to start a one-on-one conversation), call, and contact info buttons.

The feature isn’t all the way there, however. This tends to happen with features that haven’t been released yet. So far, when a user is mentioned, that user doesn’t get a notification stating that they’ve been mentioned. Google is still working on bringing mentions to Google Messages. So, it’s still ironing out the kinks.

Questions

There are still a few questions in the air. Firstly, we don’t know if Google will make this a Pixel-exclusive feature. Also, we don’t know if this will only work for devices in the chat with RCS enabled. Obviously, since the RCS situation is still pretty fluid, there’s no telling if we should expect this to work for everyone. Only time will tell.

The post Watch out, WhatsApp! This feature makes Google Messages a threat appeared first on Android Headlines.