It's been a couple of months since the support for Samsung Messages officially ended. And as someone who used it for years before being forced to switch to Google Messages, there are still things I miss about it.
Google Messages isn't bad. It has a lot going for it, especially with RCS support. I just feel like it's missing a bunch of conveniences that Samsung Messages had figured out a long time ago. If Google could add these, long-time Samsung Messages like me would certainly appreciate that.
Categories for organizing chats
Sorting is better than scrolling
If there’s one feature I want Google Messages to steal immediately, it’s this one. On Samsung Messages, you could create folders for different things like work, friends, miscellaneous, finance, and so on. This is a big deal because text messaging is where you get all kinds of texts — work pings, group chats, bank alerts, OTPs, and even spam. With all of that piling up, it doesn’t take long for your inbox to become a mess.
Folders fix that by letting you sort chats into relevant categories. You don’t have to scroll through half a dozen promotional messages just to find an important alert from your bank.
Google Messages doesn’t have anything similar for organizing your chats. At best, it lets you archive chats and auto-delete OTPs after 24 hours, but that’s about it. There’s no good reason for Google to not borrow this feature.
Auto-delete option for old texts
Set it and forget it
Text messages don't exactly take up much space, but there's no point keeping old ones around forever either. Google Messages takes care of deleting OTPs, but for everything else, it's on you to go in and clean things up manually.
Samsung Messages had an auto-delete option that handled this automatically. Once you enabled it, the app would delete messages after you reached 1000 text or 100 multimedia messages. It's a small thing, but it can keep your inbox from getting cluttered. So yes, Google Messages could certainly benefit from something like this.
Easy translations
No more copy-paste translating
Samsung Messages also had a handy translation right inside your chats. So, if you ever received a message in a different language, you could simply select the text and hit the Translate option.
This worked the other way too. You could reply in your own language and translate it before sending. I found this genuinely useful when chatting with people who didn't understand English. It’d save me the trouble of switching input languages and trying to type in a language I’m not comfortable with.
Google Messages doesn’t have any translation feature baked in. Sure, you can technically use Circle to Search for translation, but that’s a workaround, not a feature.
Better search tool
Just show me the whole message
Google Messages has had a search feature for years now, but there’s still one thing Samsung Messages did better.
Typically, when you're searching for a text, you type a keyword and hope it leads you to the right message. But if that keyword is something as common as “delivery,” things can get tricky fast. That’s because Google Messages only shows a snippet of each result in search, and that often isn’t enough to tell you what the message is about. So you end up tapping through result after result just to find the one you actually want.
Samsung Messages handled this better. When you searched for something, it showed you the entire message, so you could easily tell if that was the text you were looking for.
Fewer distractions
AI, please sit this one out
Credit: Brady Snyder / MakeUseOf
Credit: Brady Snyder / MakeUseOf
Credit: Pankil Shah / MakeUseOf
AI is now a part of almost every Google app at this point, but I think Google Messages is the last app where it’s needed. Chatbots make sense in apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, but text messaging is supposed to be simple. So yes, I’m not surprised that most people just end up hiding Gemini from Google Messages.
Google Messages’s Magic Compose also feels unnecessary. It tries to be useful, but when you’re replying to someone with text generated using AI, it almost always feels lifeless. It misses the rawness most of us expect from texting in general.
Samsung Messages had none of this. There weren’t any features screaming for your attention, which made the whole messaging experience feel even better.
Google has taken some inspiration, but there’s still room for improvement
I want to be fair to Google here. They’ve already taken some inspiration from Samsung Messages, and it shows. The most recent one is chat themes. You can use different backgrounds for each chat, which means all your chats don’t look the same anymore.
Google Messages now also has a trash folder that keeps your deleted texts for 30 days before removing them permanently. Earlier, you could only archive texts, so this is a useful setup. Still, the above list proves that there’s a long way to go, and it'd be great if Google could close that gap soon.