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5 Google Messages settings you might want to disable
The messaging app's default settings aren't necessarily the best.
Ten years ago, one of the best ways to upgrade your Android phone was to install a third-party texting app. The apps that came with your phone were rarely any good, and most were downright awful. Third-party apps let you schedule messages, customize each chat's appearance and notifications, and organize your messages, among others.
Then Google did two genuinely awesome things: It pushed hard for RCS chats as a universal messaging standard and made its own texting app, Google Messages, way better than it had any right to be. Throughout the 2010s, Google's haphazard mess of messaging apps became a punchline among tech enthusiasts, but these developments marked a sea change. Eventually, even Samsung threw in the towel, and the king of shipping duplicate apps deprecated its Samsung Messages app in favor of Google's solution. Today, I would never recommend a third-party texting app to most people.
What I would recommend, though, is changing some of Google Messages' default behaviors. However great it may be, there are a handful of settings that make it a lot worse. From annoying notifications to useless AI features, here are five settings you might want to disable to improve your Google Messages experience.
Read receipts are the small visual indicators that indicate when the other person has read your messages, and they are ubiquitous across messaging apps. When a platform enforces them, they create a mutual exchange of information between conversants; allowing one party to disable them, though, locks both in a digital prisoner's dilemma. Leave read receipts on, and you've traded away plausible deniability for your failure to reply without any guarantee your interlocutor will repay the favor. Turn them off, and you've made it more beneficial for the other party to do so as well, leaving you both less informed about the state of the conversation.
Maybe it makes me a political realist, but the first thing I do when setting up Google Messages on a new phone is disable read receipts. Think of it this way: would we ever have used a feature that let someone know when we had opened a letter they sent us by old-fashioned mail? Of course not. Such a thing would only cause interpersonal distrust and frustration, which is why we only use analog equivalents like USPS Return Receipts for the most consequential pieces of certified mail. You can turn RCS read receipts off in Google Messages by tapping your profile picture in the top right of the app's home screen, selecting RCS chats, and toggling off read receipts.
Modern operating system designers have grown far too comfortable putting little sounds everywhere. Having my phone beeping and booping constantly is bad enough, but my other gripe is this: why do all the auditory flourishes need to sound so... wet? Google Messages has sounds that trigger when you send or receive a message while the app is open, and they are among the worst offenders. By default, a rapid conversation sounds like a marmot having a bubble bath.
Obviously, this is down to personal preference. But even if you don't find these sounds unpleasant, people around you may. The only worse sounds a phone can make are those from the keyboard itself. Frankly, this has been a problem ever since the famous "tap dancing ants" sound made by iPod click wheels, but we can put a stop to it one annoying sound effect at a time. Or, in this case, two.
To turn off these sound effects, tap your Google profile picture in the top right corner of the app's home screen, then tap Settings. You'll see a toggle a few entries down labeled Hear outgoing and incoming message sounds. Slide it to the left and enjoy a silent Messages experience.
Google introduced bubble chats with Android 10 back in 2019. If you've ever been talking to someone in a chat app and had the chat collapse into a small circle pinned onscreen while you navigate other apps, that's a bubble chat. The idea was