Samsung Just Fired Its Own Texting App to Impress Google

Samsung is deleting its own texting app and shoving millions of Galaxy users into Google Messages like it’s a mandatory field trip to the surveillance museum.

If you’ve got a newer Samsung phone (and especially if you’re buying the next one), Samsung Messages is getting the slow, quiet “we’ll always have memories” treatment while Google Messages becomes the default.

Samsung’s PR angle is that this is about a “better messaging experience” and “modern features” like RCS.

Yes, RCS is genuinely better than old-school SMS. Read receipts, typing indicators, nicer group chats — the stuff iMessage users have been lording over you since the Obama administration. But the price of admission is putting more of your daily life inside Google’s ecosystem, where “convenience” and “data collection” are basically the same word with different lighting.

And it’s not just vibes. When one app becomes the default for a massive chunk of Android, it becomes the choke point: updates, terms, feature rollouts, whatever Google feels like this quarter. Samsung gets to cut costs and dodge responsibility. Google gets more users locked into its services.

Meanwhile, Apple sits on iMessage like a dragon on a pile of blue bubbles, watching Android companies consolidate into one big green-bubble commune.