Newsletter 
Summary: A bug in Google Messages causes the reaction panel to appear when you view a recently received image. This issue is causing frustration among Google Messages users.
Adding reactions to messages is a pretty useful tool. This allows you to tag little emojis to messages to get your feelings across. This saves time because you’re not typing full responses back. Google Messages gained the ability to add reactions a few years ago, and the platform is better because of it.
However, users have been dealing with a bit of an issue lately. It’s causing just a bit of frustration.
A Google Messages bug causes the reactions panel to pop up unwanted
If you want to add a reaction to an image, you’d hold your finger down on the image to bring up the reactions panel. Well, a bug is causing the reactions panel to automatically pop up if the message you last received was an image.
People have been pretty vocal about how this issue frustrates them. Several of the complaints come from Reddit users. While the panel popping up automatically doesn’t really ruin the whole experience, it’s still pretty annoying. One user remarked that they’d accidentally reacted to images when they opened conversations.
Accidentally reacting to images can definitely be a pain. What makes it worse is the fact that there’s no fix or workaround for the issue. The only thing you could do is send or receive a message. This is just so that the image isn’t the most recent message sent in the conversation.
At this point, Google hasn’t responded to the message just yet. So, there’s no telling if this is a bug or if Google is testing a feature. It seems that the only devices affected by this bug are ones running the beta version 20250406_01_RC00 of the Google Messages app. As more people complain about the issue, we’re sure that we’ll hear something from Google eventually.