How To Add a Signature to Text Messages in Android

Using signatures in text messages has been popular since the days of flip phones and QWERTY keyboards, but you might not know how to add signatures to your phone with today’s smartphones. Plenty of apps have removed signatures from recent updates, which may make it difficult to find out how to enable and set a signature of your choosing.

Luckily, Android is the platform of choice, and it’s easy to pick an app that will easily allow you to set signatures, display names, include contact info, and more. Let’s take a look at how to add a signature to text messages in Android.

Does My Messaging App Have Signatures?

The popularity of smartphones has largely led to a slow phase-out of signatures in most messages outside of email, where signatures still help provide context about the person emailing you. Because most users no longer need signatures in text messages, some manufacturers have concluded that they no longer need to include signatures within the app.

Samsung, for example, began removing the option to add a signature to a message in 2016 with the Galaxy S7 and no longer offers the option within the settings menu for the app. The same goes for Android Messages; the default Google texting app for Project Fi and Pixel devices stopped including the option sometime in 2017.

But just because the default messaging app for your phone lacks the option to add a signature to your phone doesn’t mean you have to miss out on signatures in texts. Plenty of third and first-party apps alike still have the ability to add a signature to the bottom of your text messages.

That honor is bestowed to Textra, a popular third-party alternative from developer Delicious. With Textra, not only can you customize almost every aspect of the user interface, from theme color to emoji appearance, but you can also use signatures on your SMS messages without any issue.

In many ways, Textra is like the more customizable version of Android Messages, using a similar design while allowing for dozens of additional features and settings within the customization menu. We’ve written about the app at great length in other cases, and this one is no different: if you want to use signatures within your text messages on Android, Textra is a great choice for communication.

Using Textra for Signatures

Setting up a signature on Textra is easy, and if you’ve used Android Messages before, you’ll likely feel at home as soon as you start up the app. Once you’ve downloaded the app from the Play Store here and you’ve allowed Textra to complete the setup process on your device, you’ll be greeted with the conversation screen inside the app.

In the upper right-hand corner of the display, you’ll find the triple-dotted menu icon to open the context menu in Textra. Tap on this, then tap Settings to gain access to the full menu.

Once inside the Settings menu in Textra, scroll down through the main menu until you find the Sending category; it’s the fourth down. While there are several options under this category, the third selection, “Signatures,” allows you to load the Signatures menu inside Textra.

When you first load this menu, you’ll see a blank screen that lacks a signature to start. You’ll need to add a signature to your list to get started by tapping on the floating action button in the lower right-hand corner of the display. This will load an empty box, with which you can input a new signature into the app.

Once you’ve entered your signature and hit ‘Okay’ on the box, you’ll see the blank screen from before now feature two new options. First, you’ll see a toggle at the top of the box for “Add Signature,” which allows you to enable and disable your signature being added to messages within the app. You can turn this on and off as needed to prevent you from having to constantly reenter your signatures after deleting them to turn them off.

The second option is the ability to choose a signature from the list; you’ll see the first signature you made populate this list alone for the time being. At the right of each entry, there’s a small triple-dotted menu icon that allows you to either change or delete a particular signature.

By adding a second signature using the floating action button at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see why this option exists. Once you’ve added a second signature, you can choose between the two at will by selecting the dot along the left side of the display.

Once you’ve finished entering your signature into the menu, you can return to the conversation screen. Opening up a thread or a new message box will show a slightly different input box than usual. Underneath the entry field for your text, you’ll find the signature you chose for your text messages below this field. After you send your message, the signature will automatically be added to the end of the text.

There is one caveat, of course. Unlike some older phones from the last decade, Textra likes to add your signature to the right of the message instead of directly below. You can solve this by either hitting enter on your keyboard before sending the message or by hitting enter inside of your signature before inputting it. We recommend doing the latter since hitting enter on each message can be pretty annoying overall.

Beyond this small complication, however, the experience as a whole is actually pretty great, making it easy to add a simple or complex signature to your message. Signatures don’t seem to have a character limit in Textra, or at least, don’t seem to have one that stood in the way of us inputting whatever text we wanted into the field.

Other Apps

Textra is far from the only application that has the ability to add signatures to your text messages. Even as other applications, including the previously-mentioned Android Messages and Samsung Messages, continue to remove the signatures feature from their application, there are always other third-party SMS offerings on the Play Store to choose from.

Chomp SMS is one such example, though considering it’s an older app by the same developer as Textra, anyone who doesn’t like Textra will likely want to skip this app. Go SMS Pro still has support for signatures in their settings as of writing. The themes available to Go SMS users make it one of the most customizable on the market today, even if it isn’t quite as slick as Textra’s more modern interface. Verizon Messages is also an option for users looking to use a signature. Though it wasn’t our cup of tea, at 4.6 stars on the Play Store, it’s well-loved by its users.

If you’re using a different SMS app than one of the ones mentioned here, you can dive into the settings of that respective app to see if the signatures option is somewhere in those settings listed. Android doesn’t use a global signature option, so if your SMS app has the ability to use signatures, you’ll find it in the respective settings of each app.

You can also choose to use the shortcut method within your keyboard application. By diving into the settings of your keyboard app, you can add a shortcut that makes it easy to convert a piece of text to a different word or phrase. For example, you can choose the word “signature” to become your full signature when you type it so that you can pick and choose when it appears, and you can add it to the texting app of your choice. This workaround is great if you want to stick with the messaging app you already use but can’t use signatures within the app.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you miss the days of text signatures but still have questions, don’t worry. We’ve included this section just for you.

I want to use my default text messaging app. What can I do?

One thing about using third-party applications is that it isn’t always to manage your text messages. Fortunately, the Android operating system lets you customize which application you want to use. All you need to do is set the third-party application you’ve chosen as the default texting app on your Android device.

Textra will prompt you to set it as the default app, or you can go to Settings>Apps>Default Apps to enable this change.

So, do you still use signatures in your text messages, or have you moved away from SMS altogether for newer chat applications? Let us know in the comments below!