If you’ve been lamenting the relatively limited size of the Google Messages text box, good news: it can now get bigger than just four lines. Last month, Google Messages redesigned its compose field — the area where you write your message — but a lot of fans took issue with the fact it could only display four lines of text at once. This was a particular pain point if you had to share a long URL that took up the majority of the field.
Now, though, things are changing. In the latest version of the Google Messages beta, the text field can expand up to 14 lines before you need to scroll to see what you’ve typed. It’s not yet available in the stable release but should be soon.
While this isn’t a major update, it’s a much-needed quality of life improvement — and just one of many to come to Google Messages in the past several months. Others include the ability to watch YouTube videos directly from the chat, improved message backups, and much more. Google Messages will also receive the improved RCS support, according to Google, although it isn’t clear when the full update for that will roll out either.
Since this is still a beta feature, it isn’t clear when it will finally roll out to the stable version of Google Messages, but we expect to see it in the next several weeks. In the mean time, keep a look out for other improvements. With the Material 3 update for Material You, Google Messages has also gained more padding around the text field and a somewhat larger send button — again, not groundbreaking improvements, but small tweaks that will make the overall user experience that much better.
Google has consistently released improvements to Google Messages, especially in the wake of Samsung shuttering Samsung and Verizon shuttering their own messaging applications. If updates continue at this rate, Google Messages stands to become the single best option out there.