Hallelujah, Google is finally going to fix the silly Messages photo delivery issue (APK teardown)

Google keeps making the Messages app better. Recently, with the Android Feature Drop for May 2024, the company finally brought the ability to edit messages up to 15 minutes after you send them. Now, we’ve spotted another cool feature coming down the pipeline that will fix one of Messages’ more annoying current problems.

The problem is grouping photos together when a user sends multiple pics in one RCS message. If you do this right now, what you’ll see is each photo you attached to that message coming through one by one. Not only is this annoying, but it clutters up the chat and makes it difficult to find the text context to photos if the message itself is way up at the top and the last photo is way at the bottom.

Thankfully, the latest version of Messages (v.20240603) has code that fixes this issue. We needed to activate some flags manually to see it, but you can check out for yourself what happens in the video clip below:

The chat above features a grid of media sent in one RCS message, a much better system than sending each piece of media one by one.

According to what we see from these activated flags, this new behavior occurs with any message with two or more photos attached. So even if you only send two photos, you’ll still get a grid delivery instead of a piecemeal one.

As usual, it’s tricky to say when this feature will be switched “on” for general users. Given that the code is already in the app, we’d expect it to land in the next few weeks or so. Stay tuned, as we’ll likely have more information to give you on it soon.