All change for Galaxy.

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Samsung’s own brand of text messaging — an ever-present on Galaxy phones for more than 15 years, is disappearing. But that’s not the only thing missing. Some users switching to Google Messages are seeing their chat histories vanish as well. This change may make your texts more secure, but it’s causing chaos.

Per Android Authority, this is a “Google Messages migration nightmare,” as Galaxy smartphone owners are "running into an issue where old and new chats are suddenly disappearing." Worse, reports suggest “they can’t get them to come back despite reinstalling the app, clearing cache, and restarting their phone.”

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Reports suggest this has now become a “widely reported trend as Samsung officially phases out Samsung Messages.” The hope is that RCS messages will return to phones after background reindexing completes. But that hasn’t stilled any nerves.

As SammyGuru reports, “a weird issue is causing chat histories in Google Messages to vanish for Samsung Galaxy users. They notice some threads, whether newer or older, lose their conversations." And thus far, "neither Google nor Samsung has yet officially acknowledged the problem.”

While Google Messages is built on the standard RCS protocol — the same one Apple had added to iMessage, the implementation uses its own servers and not the carrier ecosystem that carries old-style SMS texts. “If you have RCS messages that were ‘hosted by a carrier rather than Google’s Jibe server,’” Android Authority warns, "those specific messages may not carry over to Google Messages.”

In all likelihood, there’s little affected users can do but wait — perhaps as long as 48 hours or even longer. Don’t switch off your phone or disconnect it from your cellular carrier or ideally Wi-Fi. Most missing texts should return.

There is a strong security dimension to the switch to Google Messages, delivering the same end-to-end encryption that powers iMessage within Apple’s walled garden to almost all messaging within Android’s equivalent. But Samsung could have adopted the new encrypted RCS protocol instead of killing its own platform.

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As Android Police suggests, “Samsung killing Messages proves Galaxy phones are becoming Google’s playground.” This plays into the wider narrative that has seen Google take ever more control over the Android experience, standardizing on new features and innovations, stitching its Gemini AI ecosystem across it all.

“The Samsung Messages application will be discontinued in July 2026,” Samsung says, telling users to “upgrade to Google Messages as your default messaging app today to maintain a consistent messaging experience on Android.”