This is your six week warning. Samsung first launched its texting app in 2009. Now after 17 years, Messages starts to shut down on phones in July. It’s time to act — but with users reporting missing texts, back-up your messages beforehand.
In its end of service announcement, Samsung told users to “upgrade to Google Messages as your default messaging app today to maintain a consistent messaging experience on Android.” And now there’s plenty of online guidance as to the best ways to save your old messages (just in case) and transfer to Google Messages.
“Back up your messages,” ZDNet says. “Your texts don’t have to disappear when the app gets shut down.” You can save all your content to an external SSD or Samsung Cloud or Google Drive. Google Drive is easiest, but pick whichever you prefer.
With that done, “transferring your conversations to Google Messages is super easy,” Android Central says, notwithstanding earlier reports that a delayed process was leaving users with lost texts and an agonising wait to see if they all reappeared.
“Once the indexing process finishes,” Android Central says, “all your conversations should properly show up inside Google Messages. So if you don’t see your messages being transferred over immediately, you should see them within 48 hours.”
After backing up, ZDNet recommends users “start testing Google Messages, or alternative communication platforms, to see which one you’d prefer before Samsung ultimately pulls the plug in July. While the company hasn’t confirmed the exact date of the sunsetting, it never hurts to prepare yourself ahead of time.”
The change is coming first to U.S. Galaxy owners, but it will then roll out more widely. Samsung has been clear that its own Messages app has no future. And this end of service is actually perfectly timed. There’s another reason to change now.
This month, Apple and Google have finally unleashed end-to-end encrypted text messaging via RCS. This requires an updated iMessage app on the iPhone end and an updated Google Messages app on the Android end. Secure texting is a big deal, even if this is carrier-dependent and weighted to North America for now. And you need to change from Samsung Messages to Google Messages to enable it.
