Samsung killed its texting app, but your texts are fine.

If you have a Samsung phone and texting stopped working this month, technically nothing is broken. On July 6, Samsung shut down Samsung Messages, the texting app that came standard on Galaxy phones for years. Your old messages are not gone, and getting texting working again takes about ten minutes.

The shutdown covers US Galaxy phones running Android 12 or newer, which is most Galaxy phones sold in the last four or five years. Samsung announced the retirement in April and put a notice in the app itself, but plenty of people never saw either one. The app still opens, and it will still text emergency numbers. Everything else is shut down. Samsung's answer is to move everyone to Google Messages, the texting app that ships on most other Android phones.

Why would Samsung give up its own texting app? The short version is that texting moved to a standard called RCS, the modern replacement for SMS that handles full-quality photos, typing indicators, and encrypted chats. Google Messages already does RCS well, and Samsung was maintaining a second app that did the same job on the same phones. Samsung picked Google's.

What to do

The phones this hits hardest belong to the people least likely to have seen the announcement. A Galaxy that is a few years old and dependable, owned by someone who texts and calls and not much else. For a lot of those people, the first sign was texts that stopped going through. If that describes your parents' phones more than yours, this is your reminder to check on them.

What concerns me is the confusion window. When texting breaks, people will tap almost anything that promises to bring it back, and scammers know it. Fake texts about this exact shutdown have been circulating since April, telling Galaxy owners to tap a link to finish the switch. The shutdown is real, which is what makes the fakes convincing. The real switch happens on your phone, in settings, and Samsung does not send texts with links. Scammers follow news like this the way they follow package deliveries.

A few steps to take:

• Switch to Google Messages. Open Samsung Messages and tap 'Switch' on the notice. Or install Google Messages from the Play Store and let it ask to become your texting app.
• If nothing prompts you, set it by hand. Go to Settings > Apps > 'Choose default apps' > 'SMS app' and pick Google Messages. The menu wording varies a little by model; look for anything labeled default apps.
• Give your old conversations a day to show up. They transfer automatically after you switch. Samsung says a full transfer can take up to 24 hours, so a missing thread an hour in is normal. Don't delete anything in the meantime.
• Check on your family. If someone you love has a Galaxy and hasn't mentioned this, their texting may already be broken and they may not know why.
• Ignore anything that offers to "save your messages." No legitimate fix arrives as a link in a text or an email. The switch happens in your phone's own settings and costs nothing.

If your phone runs Android 11 or older, nothing changes yet, and phones outside the US aren't affected so far. And once you've made the switch there's an actual upside: Google Messages speaks RCS everywhere, including encrypted chats between Android phones and iPhones. Ten minutes in settings and you're texting again. And with a much better app.

Sources