Google Messages custom chat wallpapers have one more trick in store: animations

Last week, we brought you news of one of the more exciting Google Messages features we’ve seen in a while, with the app getting ready to introduce new support for custom chat wallpapers. Beyond just being able to assign a custom color palette to each chat, Messages should soon let users select from a variety of background wallpaper options, or just choose a pic of their own to use. If you’ve been curious about what kind of images will be supported there, we’ve got a very interesting update to share.

Beyond just supporting still images like JPGs you shoot with your phone’s camera, custom wallpaper in Google Messages will also work with animated GIFs.

We loaded up a test phone with a bunch of animated GIFs to see just how well this works, and the answer seems to be “quite nicely”:

Admittedly, there’s the real possibility for a poorly chosen GIF to make for an impossibly distracting chat background — but choose your animated GIF wisely, and there’s a lot of potential here to really liven up the look of your chats.

We’ve also been able to take a peek at how dark mode in Messages will work with custom wallpapers:

In light mode, we had observed some potential issues with the text and icons up at the top of the chat being a little hard to see when rendered in black against a dark wallpaper background. At least here we can see that simply using the app in dark mode should instantly solve that problem.

So far, we still haven’t seen any reports of custom chat wallpapers actually going live for Messages beta testers — but based on how functional the feature seems to be in our early evaluation, it still feels like Google could start flipping this on at nearly any moment. We’ll be keeping an eye out for when that happens, and try to spot any additional changes that might be coming along.