The Google messaging update looks bad. It reminded me I purchased textra a while ago.

It's impressive how modern companies with thousands of professional designers manage to make increasingly goofy designs lol

Okay, so I'm not crazy. I started seeing this today, and I had to stop and think "Wait, was this always here?"

I thought this was just me but I swear this is so fucking annoying

Completely unnecessary filler space

Does anyone else feel like the quality of the keyboard swipe auto-complete has completely tanked as well?

I don't know how to edit the main post on mobile so I'll just add this comment. The message I typed in the screenshot populates in a "pop up bar". The message no longer gets entered where you think it should go and it looks like shit and takes up extra screen space for no reason. I really dislike this change.

Fuckin annoying tbh. Can't stand when giga corps do this and sense it's required for rcs I can't just go get a better foss alternative sense none of the people I text are tech savvy or able/willing to switch to something else and rcs is pretty essential for me knowing if someone read it or not.

If I could I would ditch all google and giga corps products but I'm way to poor to do that. And it's so ingrained into society it's hard to find anything that works with these proprietary shit.

I paid for Textra over a decade ago, and it's easily the best money I've ever spent. It's the best texting app I've ever used and I highly recommend everyone check it out. They still churn out updates regularly and the features are above and beyond most messaging apps.

The text lines up with the recipient's text bubbles. It's on the left, and it's left justified, so it's under the other person's messages, rather than mine.

I could have sworn the old UI had the text entry closer to the right.

I hate this new layout. Why is the box smaller than the width of the screen? It was already too small. If anything they should have made it taller and kept it the same width it was before

I'm not a fan either. I will swap to literally any FOSS texting app that supports RCS.

Can Textra handle RCS yet? I bought it ages ago but ditched it when it couldn't handle RCS

It's so bad I uninstalled all updates and went back to the version that shipped with the phone. That got rid of it.

I tried to install other versions from apkmirror but the design has been in there a while and they turned it on server side. My P8 shipped with

messages.android _20230529_03_RCO1

and it's gone for me.

I will just drop this here:

Please dont let Google also scan your Messages?

I love textra. I wish I could just get everyone on signal though

Maybe they reserve that space for future AI suggestions?

I just looked through all the settings, there doesn't seem to be a way to change it back.

I like it. Previously it would hide a bunch of icons to give the bar more space, now it doesn't need to

If I had wanted all the extra bull shit that came with these updates I'd have bought an iPhone.

Just out of curiosity, how much people still use SMS? I can't remember last time I sent SMS.

Here in Finland we use mainly Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram or Signal for messaging. Almost no one I know has sent SMS in the last 10 years.

I think it's an improvement, particularly for folks like my grandfather that have the UI/font scale increased.

On his phone there was basically 1-2 words that would fit in that old text box ...

so his
text
message
preview
looked
like this

Apparently Textra itself doesn't support desktop sync like Google's app, but there are workarounds.

However, does Textra support RCS?

Yup hate the new update. I have a weird problem with deleting words too with the backspace since the update. Will probably revert to Samsung messages soon.

Me, using Google Voice for SMS: "Y'all have nice UIs sometimes?"

Damn this sucks. What are they thinking? It's a horrible way to manage a text input

I just want them to fix scheduled messages for crying out loud.

FOSS SMS > Google RCS

Or use signal like a civilized person.

It boggles my mind how people in the US still use SMS.

Smart compose is there for me. It looks like this bar will have more icons depending on the context and maybe more in the future.

While I agree this is bad, do people still use messages? In my country everyone uses WhatsApp or Telegram.

The only time I open the messages app is to get OTPs or something.

Download the messaging app of your choice. Get friends to download it if they want to contact you. Use that app and too bad if no one else does shrug