Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is working on a notification snoozing feature in Google Messages.
- This differs entirely from the text reminder feature previously seen in the app.
- The new notification snooze feature could let you snooze chats for up to 24 hours.
Google Messages used to offer a reminder function, and this could be used to effectively snooze messages too. The option isn’t available anymore, but it looks like a proper notification snoozing feature is in the works.
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.
We conducted a teardown of the Google Messages app (version messages.android_20250331_02_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic) and found numerous references to a notification snoozing feature. You can view the relevant strings below.
Code
<string name="dialog_snooze_confirm">Snooze</string>
<string name="snooze_cancel_button">Cancel</string>
<string name="snooze_checkbox_mute_exception_option">Allow notifications for when you are @mentioned</string>
<string name="snooze_dialog_message">Other members will not see that you snoozed this chat.</string>
<string name="snooze_dialog_title">Snooze notifications?</string>
<string name="snooze_failure_snackbar_action_label">OK</string>
<string name="snooze_failure_snackbar_message">Failed to snooze, try again later.</string>
<string name="snooze_failure_snackbar_message_alternative">Snooze is not available for this chat.</string>
<string name="snooze_radio_option_1_hour">1 hour</string>
<string name="snooze_radio_option_24_hours">24 hours</string>
<string name="snooze_radio_option_8_hours">8 hours</string>
<string name="snooze_radio_option_always">Always</string>Some of the strings reveal the specific snooze options, namely an hour, eight hours, 24 hours, and “always.” One of the strings also hints at the ability to snooze group chats, noting that “other members” won’t see that you snoozed the chat. It also looks like you can still choose to get notifications when you’re mentioned in a chat. It’s unclear whether snoozing only applies to chats at large or if you can snooze specific messages.
In any event, we’re glad to see Google is working on a notification snooze feature. Google Messages used to have a reminder feature that could be used for snoozing, which was accessible by tapping and holding on a message and then pressing the clock icon at the top of the page. This allowed you to set reminders for specific messages by setting a time and date.
We’d still like to see message reminders in Google Messages, but a full-fledged notification snooze feature is a welcome addition. This could be useful if you have any personal chats you’d like to respond to after work hours or vice versa. Android phones do offer a system-wide notification snoozing feature, but this only allows you to snooze alerts for 15 minutes to two hours. So the Google Messages implementation is handy if you want to snooze notifications for a longer period of time.
This isn’t the only notable change we spotted in this version of Google Messages. We also noticed a few minor UI tweaks, starting with the Google logo at the top of the page now having a background (see below).
The app also offers quick animations when you tap the plus, emoji, and voice note icons. Finally, changing the group chat icon results in a loading bar before the change takes effect. Check out the clip below for the latter tweak.
