You may have noticed that Google officially launched Profiles in Messages yesterday. These photos will take the place of any manually-configured contact photos.
You can control what image and name other users see in a conversation by using profiles. The image you’ll see inside Google Messages moving forward is the profile picture, if the person you’re speaking with has one set up. This will replace any previously set photo, such as ones you have manually added through the Google Contacts app, the company confirmed to us yesterday.
Google won’t, however, change the contact name you’ve specified.
Since this behavior overrides something you specifically curated, some people might not like it. In contrast, iMessage notifies you before altering your profile picture and gives you the option to decline the change. That being said, this feature is absent from other messaging services.
One defense is that profiles will be a huge improvement because most people don’t keep up-to-date contact photos—many conversations only use initials as the image. “addresses the problem of receiving messages from phone numbers not saved in your contacts.”
Additionally, the announcement mentioned how useful Profiles are for “particularly useful in group chats so that you know who all the other participants in the group are.”
As for other services, like Meta/Facebook Messenger, the color you specify for Custom Bubbles appears for both you and the recipient in the interim.
Profiles were first made available to beta users in the middle of November, but they are still in limited supply.