Now a Messenger

The Messages section is more than just a place to chat. It’s a place where you can find everything you need to communicate. Here, you can make calls, transfer money, and send your friends music, photos, videos and documents. With the wide range of features this service offers, it’s already been a messenger for a long time. It’s finally time to recognize this: the Messages section is now Messenger.

Along with this, we’ve added functions that you’ll commonly find in messengers, such as being able to write to people from your phone’s contacts and set custom chat backgrounds. We’ll tell you how it all works below.

From Messages to Messenger

The Messages section has been on VK since the very beginning. After all, the social network was created to give students a platform where they could meet one another and chat. Over time, chatting became only one of the many things we do in this section.

It’s here that we send our friends catchy songs we find, split dinner bills, and discuss things “face to face” using VK video calls or voice messages.

This section has long been something more than just Messages. And to recognize this, we’re giving it a more appropriate name — Messenger.

Message people from your phone’s contacts on VK

Let’s say you exchanged phone numbers with a colleague and wanted to continue chatting on VK. Now, instead of spending hours looking up their name, place of work and age, you can just sync your phone’s contacts.

If your colleague has a VK profile, you’ll be able to send them a message, but won’t see their profile, name, picture, age or anything other information. All you’ll be able to see is what you have in your phone’s contact information. You also won’t be able to tell if they’ve read your message or not. We care about everyone’s personal boundaries and allow people to choose whether they’d want to continue chatting or not.

After you send a message to your colleague, an Invitations tab will appear in their Messenger section. There, they’ll be able to view your message. If your colleague approves your message request, you’ll be able to chat with them as you usually would and send them a friend request.

Set custom backgrounds

This big update comes with a nice bonus: now you can set custom backgrounds for your chats. Choose one of the default ones or upload an image, such as a picture of your significant other, pet or dream vacation destination. You’ll see this picture in the background of all your chats.

To set a background, open your VK mobile app settings, go to Appearance and then Chat background, or you can go there directly by following this link on the mobile app: vk.com/settings?act=chat_bg.

We have many more features in the works that would give you various ways to customize your messenger. Chat backgrounds are just the beginning.

To top it off, the maximum size of files that you can send in the messenger, comments or discussions has been increased from 200 megabytes to 2 gigabytes. Freely share files for work or school without having to use external services.

All features on VK complement each other, giving you the ability to do almost anything, all in one single app. In the Hub, you can book a taxi, and in the Messenger, you can split the cost of it with your friends. If you have your eye on something on the AliExpress mini app, you can send your friends a link so they can also order it. When you discover an energizing morning track in your music recommendations, you can send it to your colleagues to give them this boost of energy as well. Alongside everything you’ll find in the other tabs, you’re in for an all-inclusive experience. Chat, learn, work, relax — all on the VK app.