Google has announced an update to the Messages app, which will automatically delete OTP messages and sort messages into categories, much like Gmail, on Tuesday. 

The two new features aim to make messages more useful and less clutter-free. As more and more of the Indian market use online messaging apps such as Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal to communicate, messages become a sitting place OTPs and other promotional messages.

The updates will roll out in the coming weeks to Indian users running Android 8 or newer on their devices. The Verge reported that a Google spokesperson declined to comment when asked for an international release date. 

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Gmail-like message organisation

The messages app is pushing out a new way to view messages now. This new method uses machine learning to automatically sort messages into categories such as promotional, personal, spam and whatnot. 

Messages will be divided into tabs that’ll help you reach the messages that require your attention with ease. As mentioned earlier, we’ve seen this sorting in Gmail for quite some time now, which means it should work just fine for your messages as well.

Google India also stated that ML tech sorting these messages would be functioning locally on the user’s phone, which means you should access your categorised messages when offline. 

Option to auto-delete OTPs in 24 hours

The second feature that Google is bringing to the Messages app is the option to delete OTP messages automatically within the next 24 hours.

OTPs are designed to be useless minutes after they’re generated, which means as more users use online messaging apps for communication, the default messages app on their phones becomes a huge collection of useless OTP messages. The ability to delete them automatically after a certain point of time should make the app clutter-free and useable. 

The app will automatically show the user a suggestion prompting to enable the feature. However, users can always revert to their default settings should they want their OTPs to stay.

The update will be rolling out to Indian Android users with Android 8 or above in the coming weeks. Once again, both the features are completely optional and can be toggled in the app’s settings. 

By making the app clutter-free and making it easy to reach the messages you actually need to, the entire user experience should become a lot better.

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