How To Add Someone To A Group Text On Android

How did people ever communicate before group texts came into existence? It’s one of the easiest ways out there to get a bunch of people into a conversation to work out the logistics of an event you all are trying to setup. They also work well for, say, general business conversation or to simply get information across to multiple people, such as the birth of a new baby or news that a family member has passed away. So, group texts are extremely useful, but after you start a group text, how do you add new people to that text?

If you follow along below, we’ll show you how to add someone to a group text on Android, step by step. Let’s dive right in.

Add someone to a group text on Android

As is pretty similar to the iPhone, you can’t easily add someone to an existing group text. The iPhone has the added benefit of supporting iMessage, which does allow you to add someone to an existing group text, but only up to a certain number of people. Android doesn’t have the luxury of something like iMessage, so adding folks to a group text is still fairly complicated and a big hindrance.

Since you can’t actually add someone to an existing group text on Android, you have to start a new group text with that new person every time you want to include an additional number in the conversation. Here are the steps:

1. Open up your stock Android text messaging app.
2. At the top-right corner of the app, click on the New Message icon.
3. Now, you’ll want to add every number that was in the previous group conversation, but this time, you’ll want to make sure to include the new number that you want to be part of the group text as well.
4. Finally, just send a text message to finish the group creation.

As you can see, it’s fairly straight forward to adding a new person to your group conversation; however it’s a little bit of a hindrance that you cannot simply add individual numbers to an existing group conversation.

Facebook Messenger

Adding individuals to a group message via traditional SMS is no easy task. However, as modern technology and new communication platforms, SMS itself seems to be going the way of the dinosaur. Messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others are becoming the medium of choice. And as an added bonus, it’s a whole lot easier to add folks to an existing group conversation on platforms like these. For the purpose of this article, we’ll show you how you can do this on the Android version of Facebook Messenger.

The first step is to open up Facebook Messenger on your smartphone or tablet. You’ll then need to tap on the Message Group that you want the new individual to have a part in. Then, tap on the name of the group at the top of the chat. If a specific name was not set, this could simply be a list of names in the group. From there, under the Preferences category you’ll want to click on the See Group Members link. Then, at the top right of the screen, press the Add Person button. You’ll have the option to scroll through your list of contacts, and add the individual or multiple individuals to the group.

Adding group members isn’t limited to people that you’re friends with. You’ll even have options to add people that you aren’t necessarily connected with, but that requires you to search for a specific name in the Search bar. You could type in “John Smith”, find the John Smith you’re looking for by profile picture, and then add to the group.

An easier way to invite specific people is through a group link. Within the Options of your specific group chat, there’s actually a link that you can copy to your clipboard. Send that link to people you want to add to your group on an individual basis, and they’ll be able to join simply by clicking on the link. It makes it easier than searching for people by name like mentioned above.

Verdict

Group conversations is a handy tool to keep around, but as you can see, it might not be the most intuitive tool in the toolbox. Still, it’s not impossible to add individuals to group conversations — it’s just a tad bit of a hindrance. However, if you use things like Facebook Messenger, it’s just a little bit easier to manage.