Google Messages finally reverses an annoying change, making it easier to organize your contacts
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Put a face to a name on your own terms. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Google has announced that users of its Messages app will once again be able to set names and photos for their contacts after the app switched to a social media profile-style system in 2024.
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As 9to5Google notes, profile sharing (originally named profile discovery) was rolled out to Messages users from March 2024, replacing the names and contact images ascribed to a user’s contacts with information from their contacts’ Google accounts.
Following this, Google implemented the "customize how you are seen" page in Messages, an unskippable process that leaned even more heavily into a social platform style of self-presentation. Though the decision to make profile sharing the only way to set names and contact photos has been reversed, users can seemingly still opt to use their contacts’ preferred information – there's no indication that profile sharing has been ditched entirely.
Customizing a contact’s information is, as one might expect, fairly straightforward: you simply tap the name or photo of a contact within the chat, opening a page containing the user’s details, which can then be manually updated. The addition of profile sharing was originally announced in November 2023, and may be viewed as part of Google’s efforts to present a functionally similar rival to Apple’s iMessage.
