All change for Samsung

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Samsung has just handed a win to Google, as the Android-maker consolidates even tighter control over the world’s biggest mobile ecosystem. Samsung’s decision to kill its own Messages app was expected — to do so in just 12 weeks was a surprise. It also has major implications for the future of messaging on your phone.

“The Samsung Messages application will be discontinued in July 2026,” the company confirmed a week ago. “Upgrade to Google Messages as your default messaging app today.” The Galaxy-maker lauded the benefits of switching to Google Messages, including RCS messaging “across Android and iOS.”

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At its simplest, this now creates the closest parallel to Apple’s iMessage we have ever seen on Android. While Google Messages has built the RCS protocol into its platform, it is actually built on its own Jibe platform across Google’s servers. It does not rely solely on carrier networks in the way standard RCS does.

There are nuances, including the regional timing of the end of Samsung Messages. But this was the goal when Google took over the global rollout of RCS, which had relied on telco networks beforehand. Given Apple’s refusal to add RCS to iPhone until 2024, this all turned RCS into an Android iMessage alternative, albeit one that struggled to compete with WhatsApp without cross-platform options.

Here’s the problem. While Samsung’s decision leaves Android messaging more like iMessage than ever before, it exposes a major issue with Apple’s imminent RCS upgrade, which will add cross-platform end-to-end encryption for the first time.

The risk is that Google’s frustration with the pace of RCS’s rollout will now be repeated, as networks enable the new RCS protocol to deliver cross-platform, secure messaging globally. Until then, the RCS security risk flagged by the FBI and other security agencies remains unresolved.

Samsung’s decision also highlights a missed opportunity. Instead of a direct bridge between the two dominant platforms — iMessage and Google Messages — cross-platform messaging will now rely entirely on the carrier-driven RCS standard.

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In fact, Samsung’s rationale for its decision to push its users to Google Messages, “to maintain a consistent messaging experience on Android,” exposes the issues in relying on cross-platform, network-enabled messaging driven by the standard RCS protocol. And that’s what we will now get between Android and iOS.

Apple’s RCS encryption upgrade is imminent and may come with iOS 26.5, its next major iPhone firmware upgrade. Quite how many carriers will be enabled at launch remains to be seen. What happens then is critical.