Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The RCS Universal Profile v2.7 introduces new features like message editing and the ability to remotely delete sent texts.
- Google Messages has been working on implementing remote deletion since at least last month.
- While still not publicly available, we’re now able to preview how remote deletion will look in the app.
RCS finally arrived in full force last year, changing the way many of us message. Not only were walls falling down between Android and iOS communication, but new features were arriving by the boatload, from read receipts to improved media support. Last month, we caught wind of progress Google Messages was making towards implementing what has to be one of our most anticipated RCS abilities yet: being able to remotely delete sent messages. And while it’s still not here yet, we’ve finally managed to get a look at how it will work in action.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
So far, deleting a text even sent over RCS just removes the message from your own phone — there’s no take-backsies. When digging through Messages version 20250131_02_RC00, however, we identified some text strings that quite explicitly referenced messages being deleted from remote devices. But all we really had to go on were those text labels.
Today we’re looking at the newer messages.android_20250317_01_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic release, and it appears that Google developers have been quite busy. This still isn’t a publicly accessible part of the app, but we were able to coax Messages into showing us how this remote-delete action might work. The first two screens you see below show what you’ll observe on your own phone, while the third depicts how deleted messages will appear on the receiving end:
As this in-progress interface exists now, users are presented with the option to only remove a message from their local device, or to attempt to also remove it from the recipient’s (or multiple recipients’ in the case of group chats). Because this feature relies on recent additions to the RCS Universal Profile spec, the app warns that users still running older software may not support remote deletion.
Beyond remote deletion not working with older software, there’s also a time limit to it. Google Messages will only let you claw a message back within the first fifteen minutes of having sent it — after that, and you’ll only be able to remove it from your own phone, with the remote option no longer accessible. That’s a bit shorter than the time period allotted by services like WhatsApp, but still feels plenty sufficient for most purposes.
We still can’t say with much certainty when this support might be ready to go live, but based on the development progress we’ve observed so far, it really does feel like there’s some good momentum to it.
