Google Messages loses reply reminders and birthday features

The "Nudges" feature was quietly added to Google Messages a couple of years back, and it was honestly pretty helpful. It would give you a friendly reminder if you had messages you forgot to respond to, or had conversations in the app that might need a follow-up. Also, if you're not great at remembering dates, like birthdays, there were notifications that would help you with that too.

However, as the folks over at 9to5Google noticed, the "Nudges" feature has suddenly vanished from the latest stable and beta versions of Google Messages (v20240429_01_RC00). It's a bit of a surprise since it was still featured as recently as the previous stable app build. This capability could be previously found in Settings > Suggestions, which now only includes the Smart Reply, Magic Compose, Suggested stickers, and also Suggestions, but with "Nudges" no longer appearing in the sub-menu.

Google hasn't given a clear reason for ditching the feature, and it is still listed on Google Messages' support page, further adding to the mystery. Maybe Google has something better up its sleeve, but until then, this sudden disappearance leaves us a bit perplexed.

Hopefully, this will be addressed later this month during Google I/O, where we can maybe hear about another feature that would serve as a replacement for "Nudges." With AI taking over many of these types of features, it's a possibility that an AI-powered will be unveiled instead. This seems to be the case with Gmail and pretty much all the applications under the Google Workspace umbrella, where AI features are seemingly taking over to enhance productivity. We will just have to wait and see what happens in Mountain View in a couple of weeks' time.