You shouldn’t necessarily need to have your phone out to send a message, and over on the iPhone, that’s what Apple’s iMessage does. But what about on Android?
In the Android world, there hasn’t been a lot to let you send and check text messages from outside of your phone, at least not natively. There are always other services — Google Hangouts and Facebook Messenger, for instance — but Android’s default text messaging app has needed the phone.
That’s distinct from Apple’s text messaging service iMessage, which has linked up the messaging on an iPhone to the app on an iPad, and even connecting it to iMessage on macOS, providing lots of different ways to view, collect, and send messages. This makes it helpful and ensures you don’t lose messages if you jump across devices, but it’s an experience that is lost on Android.
Next week, however, that might be a different story.
This week, Google has started rolling out centralised web messaging to its standard text messaging app “Messages”, updating the app to support web messaging with a central login at messages.android.com.
Go there now and you’ll just find instruction to getting web messages working for you, but right now in Australia, the app doesn’t support the web platform.
However, the good news is that it’s coming, and that you shouldn’t have to wait long, either.
Local representatives for Google confirmed to Pickr this week that Australian support for the web messaging option will be rolled out, continuing over the next week. That means if you don’t have the updated Messages app today, you might within the next week.
Every phone will be slightly different, however, and the default and generic messaging app may not be the same one your phone ships with. Take Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9+, which both use a Samsung messaging app as default compared to the Google one found on devices like those from Motorola and the Google Pixel phones.
You can download it to any Android device, mind you, just make sure to switch to it as your default app for collecting SMS and text.
Right now, we’re not sure how many Android devices in Australia have the newly updated web messaging-capable Messages app, but we should see the updates very soon, which means messaging will go beyond the phone in the very near future.
