Google Messages finally gets proper unsend functionality with ‘Delete for everyone’

Over the years, Google Messages has picked up features that elevate its status to a deserving Apple Messages substitute. The latest addition, allowing you to fully unsend messages, is now reaching a breadth of Android users, saving them the pain of awkwardness of wrongly sent texts.

After previewing the “Delete for everyone” feature in its Messages app, Google is releasing it to people beyond the beta testing tribe. As expected, the functionality allows senders of the message to delete it for all parties in a peer-to-peer or a group chat and replaces older functionality where deleted messages would still appear for others.

The Delete for everyone functionality was spotted by a Redditor with a username seeareeff (via 9to5Google), but they did not specify which version of Google Messages you need to get it working. We could not activate it at our end despite updating the app to the latest version, suggesting this might be a server-side switch.

Notably, these changes will only apply to messages and chats over RCS — a relatively modern internet-based messaging protocol that Google hopes, but has trouble budging Apple, to replace traditional SMS. That means everyone in the chat must have RCS enabled, which is anyway necessary if you want to enjoy features like message reactions or typing indicators, to enjoy the functionality. You must also update Google Messages to the latest version, else deleted messages may still appear for some folks.

Besides chats with others who use Google Messages, the cross-platform nature of RCS means that it should, in theory, also work seamlessly with Apple Messages. This is because Apple recently adopted RCS along with its own iMessage protocol for the Messages app. One requisite, however, is the other people must have updated their iPhone or iPad to iOS 18. It’s still not fool-proof, though, since RCS may require setting up for some people (from Google Messages’ settings) and may not be supported by every telecom carrier.

With Google Messages now adopted as the de-facto messaging app for Android, we can expect Google to push for aggressive standardization.