At the beginning of this yearGoogle Messages seemed to have decided on a new design for read receipts. The RCS app reversed that, but now it’s looking for an element of that big redesign.
The important review of read receipts, which first appeared on August 2024placed everything inside a single circle located in the bottom right corner of the message bubble:
| Ellipsis | Shipment |
| Single check with ring | Sent |
| Double check with ring | Delivered |
| Solid Double Check Circle | Read |
In recent weeks, Google Messages has mostly returned to the two-circle design that appears below the message bubble:
Google is now testing a variant that moves the timestamp and encryption lock icon so that they no longer flank read receipts. You can now see that information by swiping left, and direct answers are accessed by swiping right. Originally, this was part of the big redesign and saved you from having to touch every bubble.
It’s not clear why Messages comes and goes in the actual layout of read receipts. (If you go to a chat’s Details page, you’ll find that the all-in-one approach is widely implemented.) Anyway, Google seems to be splitting the changes.
This particular change has not been widely implemented and is something we have only seen on one device running the Google Messages beta version. It started appearing last week.
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