After beta testing in recent weeks, Google Messages today officially announced custom chat themes and backgrounds on Android.
Requiring RCS, the goal is to “make every conversation feel uniquely yours by customizing the colors and background wallpapers for individual chats.”
Whether you want a favorite family photo behind your main group text or a sleek, minimal color palette for your work contact, the choice is entirely up to you!
Chat themes let you change the bubble accent color and the chat wallpaper. Google offers a gallery of “curated” backgrounds with categories like Animals, Landscapes, and Space. You can also upload your own image.
After making a selection, the “message bubbles automatically adjust to perfectly complement the new scheme.” That said, you can “manually tweak the color palette anytime” with the top carousel.
Chat themes are “private to you” and “only visible to you on your device, so you can style your chats without affecting what the recipient sees.” To set:
- Open Google Messages and select the chat you want to style.
- Tap the recipient or group name in the top bar OR tap the More icon (⋮) in the top right corner.
- Tap Chat theme.
- Pick your colors & wallpaper:
- Select a color preset from the palette.
- Under Wallpapers, tap Choose a photo to upload from your gallery, or browse through the preset categories.
- After selecting the wallpaper, tap “Next” -> It takes you to the preview screen. Once you’re happy with how it looks in the preview, tap Apply!
The Chat theme menu lets you “Reset to default.”
As of this morning, we’re not seeing this widely rolled out yet in the beta or stable channels. Be on the lookout for a red dot in the three-dot menu once it’s available.
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