Where’s my timestamp? Google Messages is updating its UI, and users are confused

When you’re looking back on your text message history, it’s not just the texts and the GIFs you care about. The metadata also tells a story, too: when messages were sent, if they went out with encryption, and whether or not they were even received. If you’re opening up Google Messages this week but suddenly are having trouble finding some of those details, worry not — Google’s just tweaking how you access them.

So far, when you’ve gone to tap on a message in your chat history, Messages would pull up its metadata right below: timestamp, delivery status, encryption — the works. But 9to5Google has now spotted a new design that’s been rolling out to more and more users, changing up how we see this info — and it’s not without its improvements.

The big shift is that this is now swipe-based; users can swipe left in a chat to view timestamps and encryption. And critically, this now appears for all messages at once, rather than forcing you to go through and tap on each one, as you can see below on the left.

If instead of swiping left, you elect to swipe right, that will let you send a reply. And tapping on messages isn’t going away altogether — just now, all it shows is delivery status.

The new interface has been spotted in version 20260910_03_RC02 of Messages. It’s not year clear if that release is necessarily required in order to get the new interface, but if you’re still not seeing it yet, make sure you’ve got your latest updates installed.