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.
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