Earlier this week, Google opened a public beta program for its Messages app. I guess we shouldn't be too surprised since this is Google we're talking about here, but the very first Messages beta (v4.7) is instantly crashing on start for most.

First Messages beta is out (v4.7), aaaand it completely crashes on start. Off to a great start. pic.twitter.com/5lffb3dwuW — Artem Russakovskii (@ArtemR) July 11, 2019

We tried out the Messages beta on a number of phones, including some running Q Beta 5, and it force closed immediately on all phones. A tipster said that he tried rebooting and clearing the cache to no avail, and we had the same experience. Long story short: don't install this beta.

Our resident app teardown master, Cody, believes that this may be due to Messages v4.7 expecting a new version of Google Play services that hasn't rolled out to the public yet. It's happened in the past, and it probably wasn't caught in testing because the engineers didn't account for differences in release schedules. It's certainly a plausible theory.

So, yeah — don't install the new Messages beta. You'll be forced to deal with uninstalling updates, hitting APK Mirror for the latest stable version (you can find it here), and reinstalling.