Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Messages is finally working on letting you select and copy a part of a message instead of the whole thing.
- Users have been asking for this small but convenient feature for a long time.
- We got the feature working on a beta version of Google Messages, indicating a wider rollout should follow soon.
Google Messages is constantly evolving and adding new features, but some long-standing pain points have somehow survived all that progress.
One of the most frustrating issues Messages has had since the very beginning is the inability to copy just part of a message. Well, we now have proof that Google is finally fixing this problem.
While looking through Google Messages version messages.android_20260212_01_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic, we spotted a small but meaningful tweak that allows users to select and copy specific portions of an SMS or RCS message, a feature users have been wanting for years.
Right now, long-pressing a message in Google Messages only gives you a Copy option that ends up copying the entire message. That’s fine for short texts, but it becomes very annoying when you’re dealing with long messages containing things like addresses, OTPs, links, and such.
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Users have to rely on awkward workarounds to get around the problem, such as selecting text from the Recents/overview screen on Pixel phones or copying the entire message and then trimming it in the clipboard overlay. However, none of these solutions have felt intuitive.
Thankfully, Google is finally paying attention to this issue. Messages recently introduced a redesigned context menu that appears when you long-press a message. This menu displays the full message content, along with actions such as Copy, Star, and Forward. What’s new here is that the message text inside this context menu is now selectable.
After long-pressing a message, the updated context menu appears as usual, but you can now drag to select a specific portion of the text, after which Android’s system-level selection menu appears, letting you copy only the highlighted text.
Notably, the existing Copy button in the context menu is still around, so you can tap it if you want to copy the full message.
Unfortunately, this feature is currently not yet live for all users, even on the open beta channel. As with many Google Messages changes, it’s likely being tested quietly before a wider rollout.
⚠️ 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.
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