Google Messages chat wallpapers have another trick: 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. In addition to being able to specify a custom color palette for each chat, Messages should soon let users select from different background wallpaper options, or simply choose a photo of their own to use. If you’re curious about what types of images will be supported there, we have a very interesting update to share.

In addition to supporting still images like JPGs shot with your phone’s camera, custom wallpapers in Google Messages will also work with animated GIFs.

We loaded a test phone with a bunch of animated GIFs to see how well it worked, and the answer seems to be “pretty good”:

Granted, there’s a real potential for a poorly chosen GIF to become 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 chat.

We’re also able to see how dark mode in Messages will work with custom wallpapers:

In Lite mode, we did notice some potential issues with text and icons at the top of chats, making them a little difficult 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 resolve that issue immediately.

So far, we still haven’t seen any reports of custom chat wallpapers going live for Messages beta testers — but based on how functional the feature seems in our early evaluation, it still looks like Google could start rolling it out at almost any time. We’ll keep an eye on when this happens, and try to identify any additional changes that come along.