The death of Samsung Messages is good for everyone

Samsung fans, it’s almost time to pour one out for one of the company’s oldest Android apps. On April 4, Samsung announced that its longstanding Samsung Messages texting app will finally shut down for good this July. As has been the case with more recent Samsung phones, remaining Samsung Messages users will be migrated over to Google Messages for their new default texting app.

If Samsung Messages is the texting app you’ve been using every single day for the last few years, hearing it’s going away in just a few short months is probably awful news. But as much as change can be frustrating, it’s usually for the best.

And in this particular case, the death of Samsung Messages in favor of Google Messages is ultimately good for everyone.

RCS (Rich Communication Services) is the default texting standard for Google Messages and enables features like read receipts, typing indicators, proper group chat support, and more. It’s an infinitely better texting experience than the old SMS standard, and to use RCS on Android, you need Google Messages.

This wasn’t always the case. For years, carriers tried implementing RCS with their own standards and texting apps, but it was (unsurprisingly) a disaster. Samsung Messages even supported RCS for a while, but it was also reliant on carrier-specific standards and never properly implemented for everyone.

In 2019, Google changed RCS forever. Rather than relying on carriers, Google enabled RCS messaging for all Google Messages users, regardless of carrier or smartphone model. If you had an Android phone and downloaded Google Messages, you could start using RCS right away.

This didn’t magically fix things overnight, but it did serve as the catalyst to finally make RCS accessible to everyone. OnePlus switched to Google Messages as its default texting app in 2020, and Samsung made it the default texting app on Galaxy phones in 2022 with the Galaxy S22 series. In 2023, RCS texting was enabled by default for new and exisitng Google Messages users, rather than being something you had to manually toggle on.

For all of these reasons and more, Google Messages became the default texting experience on Android. Not only is it the texting app all major Android phones ship with out of the box, but it’s also naturally become the place for RCS on Android. Third-party texting apps (like Samsung Messages) still exist, but if you want full RCS support, you need Google Messages.

As someone who’s been using RCS with Google Messages for the last several years, there’s really no going back to old SMS texting once you’ve experienced it. Seeing when messages have been read, when the person you’re talking to is typing, being able to invite and remove people from group chats, and sending high-quality photos/videos that don’t look like garbage are all incredible features — and you only get them with RCS.

However, if you’re still using Samsung Messages, you’re missing out on all of them.

It’s worth noting that the news about Samsung Messages’ demise didn’t come out of left field. This is something Samsung has been planning for a while.

As mentioned above, Google Messages has been used as the default texting app on Samsung phones since 2022. Samsung Messages was still installed on Samsung phones at the time, but it was no longer the default texting app. Then in 2024, Samsung stopped pre-installing Samsung Messages on its smartphones altogether. Samsung Messages hasn’t been a priority of Samsung’s for years, and the app going offline in July cements what’s been written on the wall for a while now.

I understand why anyone still using Samsung Messages may not be thrilled about having to switch to a completely new texting app soon, but Google Messages is an objectively better texting experience than Samsung Messages has ever been. RCS is obviously the main reason for that, but there are plenty of other great Google Messages features, too — such as desktop pairing, message scheduling, pinned conversations, and tons more.

If you have a recent Samsung phone, chances are you’re already using Google Messages and won’t be affected by this change at all. But for everyone still on Samsung Messages, this is for the better. Will it be annoying to re-learn a new app interface, settings layout, etc.? Sure. But if the upside of that is a vastly richer and more secure texting experience, I think that’s a pretty fair trade.