If you’ve been living under a rock, the Samsung Messages app is going away. Samsung has officially confirmed that it will shut down the app in July 2026, with Google Messages taking over as the default.
The company has already started notifying users that they won’t be able to send messages through Samsung Messages (except for emergency services or contacts), and the app will also no longer be available to download from the Galaxy Store. It’s worth noting that you already can’t install Samsung Messages on the Galaxy S26 series.
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No Gemini clutter taking over your screen space
Google has been pushing Gemini across Android wherever it can, and Google Messages is no exception. The app now includes a dedicated Gemini button, letting you start chatting with the AI directly from within your conversations. The idea is to make things like drafting messages, brainstorming ideas, or planning events easier without leaving the app.
While that sounds useful in theory, it also means Gemini sits right alongside your personal chats. You can disable it from the settings, but I’m not entirely comfortable having an AI assistant so tightly integrated into an app that handles my private conversations.
With Samsung Messages, you didn’t have to deal with any of that. It was just a simple, easy-to-use RCS messaging app without any AI features taking up space or attention.
More chat customization options built right in
One thing Android users are used to is customization, and Samsung Messages absolutely nailed it. The app lets you tweak almost everything, from changing chat colors and message bubble colors to adjusting contrast, applying theme-based styles, and even using wallpaper-based color palettes.
Google Messages, on the other hand, feels pretty bare-bones in comparison. You only get light and dark themes out of the box, and while Google has been working on adding more chat themes, the feature still isn’t widely available yet (even in the beta channel).
So if you’ve been relying on deep customization in Samsung Messages, that’s something you’ll definitely miss when moving to Google Messages.
Another great part of Samsung Messages, and probably the most important feature in my opinion, is message categorization. Just like you can organize emails into different tabs like Primary, Updates, Social, or Promotions in Gmail, Samsung Messages lets you do something very similar with your texts.
You can group different senders into specific categories. For example, you can put all your bank and card messages into a financial category, keep your close contacts under primary, and even create categories for things like food deliveries or shopping updates. It makes managing messages so much easier.
Google Messages, however, doesn’t offer this. While it has added features like a trash section, there’s still no way to properly categorize messages by sender. This feels like something Google could easily improve with AI (even if that raises some privacy questions), but for now, it’s a big feature missing from Google Messages.
Google Messages isn’t a bad RCS alternative
With the Samsung Messages app shutting down in July 2026, the brand is asking users to switch to Google Messages as the default messaging app on their phones.
And while it’s not a like-for-like replacement, it’s currently the only SMS app on Android that fully supports RCS. So if RCS texting matters to you, with features like high-quality media sharing, typing indicators, stickers, and emoji reactions, Google Messages is the app you’ll have to move to.
That said, Google Messages itself isn’t a bad app. There are some customization options available, and similar to Samsung Messages, you can disable Gemini from the settings if you don’t want AI in your chats.
It also includes features like Messages for Web, which is handy for entering OTPs on your laptop, and enhanced spam protection that isn’t available in Samsung Messages.
Google Messages has improved a lot over the past few months
The reason I’m not entirely frustrated about Samsung Messages going away is that Google has been putting in real effort to improve its Messages app recently.
We’ve seen additions like a trash folder to recover deleted chats, small but helpful tools like copying specific parts of a message, and the ability to mark RCS notifications as read from Wear OS. And all of these updates have arrived fairly recently.
These updates show that Google is actively working to improve the Messages app, not just for Samsung Galaxy users but for Android users overall.
