Google Messages will soon allow you to pin conversations and “star” messages
If you ask me, there’s no better app for texting on Android other than Google Messages. There are plenty of features that make it worthwhile, along with being available on just about any Android device that you own. Throw in the fact that you can use Google Messages in your browser, and it’s an easy choice for just about everyone. The company is also continuing to develop and implement new features on a regular basis, and we might be getting two new useful features soon.
The folks over at XDA Developers performed a teardown of the recent APK release, which revealed references to the ability to pin a conversation to the top of your primary conversation list. This will make it much easier to surface important conversation threads versus having to scroll the endless list of conversations in the Messages app. When pinned, a prompt will appear at the bottom confirming that the conversation was pinned, and the thread itself will move to the top of the list.
As for being able to star messages, this seems more like an ancillary feature than something that will be regularly used. But being able to star a message and then refer back to it later can act as a reminder of sorts. I would venture to say that having the ability to star a message is better than not being able to at all.
Although these code references were found in the latest version of Google Messages, they are not available nor are they are ready for prime-time just yet. However, when Google starts adding lines of code for new features, it usually means that we aren’t too far away from seeing the feature introduced in an upcoming update.