Google Messages has received several new features over the last few months, including calendar event suggestions, scheduled messages support, auto-OTP deletion, a unified emoji menu, and a revamped UI on Samsung phones. On top of that, recent teardowns of the app have revealed that Google is working on even more useful features for the app, like a split-screen view for tablets, support for sending messages using a paired phone, and more. While these features are yet to roll out to users on the stable channel, we've now spotted even more upcoming features in a teardown of Google Messages 8.1.050.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.

Google Messages 8.1.050 just started rolling out to users via the Play Store. A teardown of the latest update has revealed new strings pointing towards two new features -- support for pinned conversation and the ability to star specific messages. The new strings indicate that the upcoming pinned conversations feature will let you pin a conversation to the top of the conversations list, giving you easy access to it as soon as you open the app.

        <string name="action_pin_to_top">Pin to top</string>
<string name="action_unpin_from_top">Unpin from top</string>
<string name="pin_limit_message">You can pin up to %1$d conversations</string>
<string name="pin_success_message">Pinned %1$d of %2$d conversations</string>
    

As you can see in the attached screenshots, the app will let you pin up to 3 conversations. But since the strings include a variable value, Google may increase or decrease the number of pinned conversations by the time the feature rolls out to users.

Along with the pinned conversations feature, we've spotted new strings pointing towards an upcoming starred messages feature. These strings suggest that Google Messages will soon let you star specific messages, and you'll be able to find starred messages through the app's search feature at a later stage.

        <string name="action_search_starred_messages">Starred</string>
<string name="search_starred_messages_title">Starred</string>
<string name="star_badge_on_click_snackbar_action">Undo</string>
<string name="star_badge_on_click_snackbar_message">Star removed</string>
    

The strings further suggest that all starred messages will show a new star badge to help you quickly identify them, but we're unsure where it will appear in the final release. We'll share screenshots as soon as we're able to enable the feature manually.

Do note that these features aren't live in the current version of Google Messages. We'll update this post as soon as they start rolling out to users with a future update.

Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.