Historically, the Google Messages beta offers a stable experience, but there’s currently a bug that crashes the app when trying to share images and links.
What’s specifically broken is the Google Messages “Select recipients” screen that shows your Recent conversations and full contacts list.
If you try to open that page in the past 24 hours or so, Google Messages will immediately crash and close the application. There are a number of ways to access that sharing screen that are all impacted, including:
- Opening Android’s system Share sheet and tapping Messages in any app.
- Messages recently introduced a forward button next to images in the chat view. The share button (next to download) in the fullscreen image is also broken.
As such, you have to manually copy and paste links you want to send. Images have to be saved to your device and shared via the Gallery inside a thread.
This is an issue with version 20250610_00_RC02.phone.openbeta_dynamic on Pixel and Samsung devices. There are no issues with the current stable release (20250528_00_RC00.phone_dynamic). Google will hopefully release a Messages beta update by Monday (if not sooner) to fix this crash for this very common share action.
However, if this issue is very disruptive to your workflows, exit the beta program (wait a few minutes), uninstall updates to Google Messages from App info, and then Update the app in the Play Store.
In other developments, Google Messages is testing a Material 3 Expressive redesign of Settings. All the list items are placed in a container, while M3 on/off toggles are finally in use. This is not yet widely rolled out.
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