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Samsung Is Killing Its Messages App in July. The Migration You Have to Do Yourself
Texts and RCS history do not transfer automatically, and Samsung has not published an exact shutdown date.
Texts and RCS history do not transfer automatically, and Samsung has not published an exact shutdown date.
Samsung is about to flip the off switch on its default messaging app, and it won't move your texts for you. Starting in July, Samsung Messages will be deactivated for US users, and the migration to Google Messages is not automatic. Conversations, RCS threads, and message history do not transfer on their own. The deactivation is not a friendly upgrade. It is a unilateral shutdown of an app that has shipped on Galaxy phones for years, and the clock is the only thing standing between a reader's texts and a message archive they cannot recover.
The reason the move matters is the part Samsung has not emphasized. According to CNET's reporting on the shutdown, Samsung has not given an exact shutdown date, and the company declined to comment on the timeline. The only certainty is the window: sometime in July, the app stops working. That ambiguity is not a minor detail. A user who waits assumes they have time, and the cost of waiting is that any SMS or RCS thread that has not been explicitly exported may be unreadable once the app goes dark.
The CNET walkthrough of the migration lays out a path the user has to run themselves. The default target is Google Messages, which now ships with RCS, spam detection, and multi-device support. The piece is clear that texts, RCS conversations, and message history do not auto-transfer, and the steps required to move them are concrete: back up the existing messages, switch the default SMS app, and confirm that the older threads actually rendered in the new app. For users on older Samsung devices still on Android 12 or 13, those steps are not optional. They are the only way to keep what they already have.
The reader's actual choice, after Samsung removes the default, is narrower than the marketing makes it sound. Google Messages is the path Samsung points to. The alternative is a third-party SMS app from the Play Store, which the CNET guide does not endorse and which will not recover any history that was not already exported. After deactivation, Samsung Messages supports only emergency-services messaging. Everything else, the personal texts, the RCS group threads, the photo messages, becomes inaccessible the moment the app goes dark.
The verification step the CNET piece does not foreground is the one that decides whether the migration actually worked. After switching the default app and importing the backup, the user has to open a representative RCS thread and confirm that the full history is there, that media renders, and that the thread still shows the participants' phone numbers rather than a placeholder. If anything is missing, the only window to re-export is before July. After that, the archive is whatever the backup captured.
The deadline is the story. Samsung has not published an exact date. The reader has, in practice, weeks.