Survey reveals a surprising amount of love for Samsung Messages

Samsung finally put an end date on Samsung Messages earlier this month, confirming that the long-running app will be discontinued in July in favor of Google Messages. The milestone has been coming for a while, but it still feels like the end of an era for one of Samsung’s oldest default apps. We wanted to know where you stood on it, and we ran a reader poll to find out.

Our own Joe Maring reacted to the news, arguing that the shutdown is ultimately good news for everyone. His view was that this isn’t really about Samsung killing off a beloved app for the sake of it, but about Android finally settling on one proper messaging standard. He pointed to Google Messages being the main home of RCS, with features like read receipts, typing indicators, and more, arguing that Samsung Messages has been falling behind for years. While fans of Samsung’s app might find the transition annoying at first, Joe’s take was that the payoff is a better and more consistent texting experience on Android.

Whether or not you agree with the theory of Joe’s approach, the poll results below suggest a lot of you weren’t quite ready to let go.

The result was fairly emphatic: 66% of voters said they still use Samsung Messages and prefer it over Google Messages, while just 11% said it was time for Samsung to retire it. Another 16% said they already use Google Messages as the default app on their Galaxy phone.

That last figure feels a little low at first glance. As Joe pointed out in his piece, Samsung has been making Google Messages the default on Galaxy phones since 2022, and it stopped pre-installing Samsung Messages altogether in 2024. With that in mind, you might have expected more readers to already be in the Google Messages camp. Then again, that’s probably where a bit of selection bias creeps in —  the news and Joe’s article were always more likely to get the attention of Samsung Messages loyalists. Still, even if the poll may lean a bit more toward readers who felt most strongly about the switch, two-thirds of the vote from thousands of participants suggests there’s still a lot of love out there for Samsung’s app.

Some of you took to the comments section of the news article to expand on your vote. Most of the reaction was negative, and a lot of it went beyond simple nostalgia for Samsung Messages. Several readers were frustrated at being pushed toward Google Messages at all, with some arguing that Google has too much control over modern texting on Android. A few pointed to RCS as the real issue, not because they dislike the standard itself, but because they see Google as gatekeeping it. As kingfish1935 put it, “RCS is the only thing going for [Google] Messages.” Going on to describe it as “clunky and not [as] fluid as other texting apps.”

That fed into another common theme in the thread: readers who would rather use something else entirely but feel the ecosystem is boxing them in. For example, reader Eviltwinm2 wrote, “I’ve been using Textra for years and will not use the Google garbage regardless of RCS.” Others focused on features they think Google Messages handles worse, such as spam deletion and dual-SIM support. There was certainly a subsection of the commenters who sounded less upset about this one app disappearing than about being nudged further into Google’s orbit.

That said, not everyone was mourning Samsung Messages. Commenter Jorge Jaime said they “switched already for RCS capabilities,” and Montisaquadeis noted they had moved over “a phone or two back.” Charles Srstka even joked, “Did anyone ever actually launch that app on purpose?” But these voices were clearly outnumbered by those unhappy with the change.