Today Mark Zuckerberg announced the introduction of some of the features that you love in Messenger to end-to-end encrypted chats, including: 

• Chat themes: We’ve added chat themes to help personalize and enhance your conversations in end-to-end encrypted chats. Tired of a plain background? Can’t wait to show your Swiftie credentials with the Midnights theme? Now you can set themes,  including static color and gradient themes, for end-to-end encrypted chats.

• Custom chat emojis and reactions: Want to personalize your response? You can see the full menu of emoji reactions and customize the quick reaction tray in end-to-end encrypted chats.

• Group profile photos: Choose group profile photos for different chats with friends or work colleagues.

• Link previews: We’ve rebuilt link previews for end-to-end encrypted chats so that you can see where a link is taking you, before clicking on it.

• Active Status: Let people see when you’re active, so they know when it’s a good time to call. You can also choose to turn this feature off, if you want to improve your privacy.

• Bubbles on Android: Bubbles (a circle with your friend’s picture) let you read and reply to messages while you’re using other apps. Once enabled, a bubble will appear when you get a new message.

We’ve also started gradually expanding testing default end-to-end encryption for Messenger. We know people want a space to connect and they want to know that those conversations are private, safe and secure. That is why we’ve spent time building a team of talented engineers, cryptologists, designers and policy experts who are all committed to rolling out default end-to-end encryption on Messenger. 

Over the next few months, more people will continue to see some of their chats gradually being upgraded with an extra layer of protection provided by end-to-end encryption. We will notify people in these individual chat threads as they are upgraded. We know people will have questions about how we select and upgrade individual threads, so we wanted to make clear that this is a random process. It’s designed to be random so that there isn’t a negative impact on our infrastructure and people’s chat experience. This also ensures our new end-to-end encrypted threads continue to give people the fast, reliable and rich experience on Messenger.

Building a secure and resilient end-to-end encrypted service for the billions of messages that are sent on Messenger every day requires careful testing. We’ll provide updates as we continue to make progress towards this goal over the course of 2023.