Google Messages changes up how you start group chats

How many group chats do you have going on right now in Messages? There’s probably a good chance you’re juggling a few at a time, whether friends, family, or co-workers, and when you need to get a new group chat started, Google Messages makes it nice and easy to spin up a fresh one. But the next time you go to do that, you might notice that things feel a little bit different, as Google tweaks the new-chat workflow in Messages.

So far, Google Messages has offered two separate paths towards getting a conversation started. To begin one, you hit the “Start chat” button in the bottom-right of the screen, which pulls up your contacts. At this point, you can tap on a contact directly to start messaging with them one-on-one.

If, instead, you want to start a group chat, there’s a “Create group” button up top. Hitting that brings you to a very similar-looking screen, but here you can select multiple contacts, finally tapping “Next” when you’ve chosen them all and are ready to group chat.

That works perfectly well, but in version messages.android_20260217_00_RC00.phone.openbeta_dynamic we see Google trying out a slightly revised approach here, one that feels like it places a greater emphasis on group chats.

Users running this release are starting to see a new “Start chat” screen that eliminates the “Create group” button at the top entirely. Instead, Messages basically defaults to an interface that lets you select multiple contacts. Now, when you tap the first one, you can either hit “Next” to immediately start messaging, or keep selecting multiple contacts to begin a group chat.

Compared to the old way of doing things, this means an extra tap for starting a new conversation with an individual, but one fewer tap to begin group chats. Depending on your habits, that’s either a small gain or a similar loss — maybe we’ll just call it even. Look for the new workflow hitting Messages on your phone soon.