Markdown text formatting coming to Google Messages on Pixel & other Android devices

Have you ever wanted to use text formatting in the Google Messages app? Well, it seems that it will soon be possible, since it is one of the features that the company has been working on for a future rollout.

Google Messages is the messaging app that comes standard on Android smartphones from many brands, although there are some that integrate their own alternatives (such as Samsung Messages on Galaxy devices). Of course, on Google Pixel phones, you will find Google Messages as the stock app to send/receive both SMS and MMS.

Additionally, Google Messages is compatible with the RCS standard, which offers support for rich messaging with features such as sending/receiving high-quality multimedia content, among others. Even Apple recently agreed to integrate RCS with iMessage, although your ‘bubble’ will still be green instead of blue.

That said, Google Messages app still lacked certain features such as support for text formatting, something present in other services like WhatsApp or Telegram. However, a recent leak (via TheSpAndroid) revealed that the app will support markdown text formatting.

In case you don’t know, ‘markdown’ is a language to format text elements using certain commands. For instance, typing **Hello** will make the word ‘Hello‘ bolded, while typing *Hello* will make the word ‘Hello‘ italic. You can learn many more markdown syntax commands on The Markdown Guide website.

According to the source, the app may not support all the markdown syntax command functions, but the basic ones most used for text formatting will surely be available. In their tests, some more advanced syntax commands like ‘lists’ or ‘quotes’ did not work.

Currently, it is possible to enable markdown text formatting in Google Messages beta v20231113. To top it off, although there is nothing official yet about a possible deployment date, TheSpAndroid suggests that this will happen ‘soon’.