Samsung Messages is discontinued in the US: how to save your texts and chats

What changed

• US only, Android 12 and newer. Since July 6, 2026, Samsung Messages cannot send messages on those phones, except to emergency numbers. Phones on Android 11 or older are not affected.
• You have to make the switch. Samsung’s instructions are to open or install Google Messages and set it as your default texting app. Samsung says your conversations then transfer automatically, and that this can take up to about 24 hours.
• New US phones cannot get it. On the Galaxy S26 and later, Samsung Messages cannot be downloaded from the Galaxy Store.
• Outside the US, nothing has changed so far. In April 2026, Samsung told the German newspaper Bild it had no plans to discontinue Samsung Messages in other countries. If you rely on it, a copy saved while everything is still in one app is worth having anyway.

Step by step

How to save a copy you can read

Samsung and Google both offer ways to move your messages to a new phone. None of them gives you a copy you can open, read or print:

To save a readable copy with SMS Backup:

1. Install the app and allow SMS access. It reads Android’s message store and, on most Samsung phones, Samsung’s chat store too, whether or not you have switched to Google Messages yet.
2. Check the conversation before you export. Open it in the app and compare it with the same conversation in your texting app, Samsung Messages or Google Messages. Look at the chat messages in particular. If some are missing, see After you switch.
3. Choose PDF, HTML or text and export. The standard PDF, HTML and text exports are free. Our free export guide walks through the steps with screenshots.
4. Keep the file off the phone. Copy it to your computer, email it to yourself or save it to cloud storage.

If the messages are for a lawyer or a court, the court printing guide covers what a court-ready export adds.

Get SMS Backup & Export to PDF on Google Play.

Where Samsung Messages kept your messages

Every Android phone has a shared message store. Your texting app writes to it, and backup apps read from it with the SMS permission you grant them. It keeps texts and picture messages in two separate lists. Samsung Messages used it for both, but kept its chats somewhere else:

Samsung’s chat store is undocumented. It is not part of Android, it does not exist on other brands of phone, and its layout is not guaranteed to be the same from one Samsung phone to the next. An app that reads only Android’s store sees your texts and picture messages but none of your Samsung chats, so a conversation can look complete while its chat messages are missing.

Google Messages works differently. It saves its chats into Android’s shared store, alongside texts, where backup apps can read them, with one exception on newer Android versions, covered in After you switch.

The old chat store after the switch

Once Google Messages is your texting app, new messages go to Android’s shared store, and Google Messages copies your older conversations into the app. Samsung’s chat store can stay on the phone after that.

Our app’s anonymous usage statistics include whether a phone has any messages in Samsung’s chat store. From September 14 to 27, 2026, more than two months after the shutdown, about one in four of our US users whose phones we could check still did. That figure covers every phone we could check, Samsung or not. It does not tell us which texting app those people use, or whether their chats also made it into Google Messages.

What it does tell you: Samsung’s store is often still there. If a conversation looks incomplete after the switch, the original chat messages may still be in it, where an app that reads the store can export them.

Why exports from different apps can differ

An export app like ours reads your texts, your picture messages and Samsung’s chats as three separate lists, then puts them in date order. On Samsung phones the same message can be stored in more than one of them, so it can appear twice. Users have sent us exports where that happened.

Removing duplicates is harder than it looks. Our first attempt treated any two messages sent in the same second as one, and it dropped real messages: two different texts sent close together, or several photos sent in one tap. We now merge two copies only when they come from different lists and match closely, and we lean towards keeping a message when in doubt. A photo without a caption, for example, is never merged away, so the same photo can occasionally appear twice.

That is why two apps can give different message counts for the same conversation, and neither number proves which export is right. Open an important or busy stretch of the conversation and compare it with your phone.

Photos in Samsung chats

Pictures sent as picture messages (MMS) are part of the message, and any app with SMS access can save them. Samsung keeps pictures sent as chats differently: as separate files in its own storage. Depending on the phone and its Android version, Android may not let other apps open those files.

So if a photo from a Samsung chat is missing from an export, the message may still be there without it. Save the photo from the conversation itself and keep it with the export. Photos in Google Messages chats do not have this problem, but they can be hidden for the reason below.

After you switch to Google Messages

Google Messages saves its chats in Android’s shared store, so backup apps can read them without knowing anything about Samsung. The exception is end-to-end encrypted chats, the ones with a lock icon. On Android 16 and newer, recent versions of Google Messages mark those so that only your default texting app can read them. Backup apps skip them, including ours, unless the backup app is your default texting app while it reads them.

If chats are missing from an export after the switch, that is a common cause on those Android versions, but not the only one. Why text messages are missing from a backup covers it, a separate Android 17 bug that hides ordinary texts, and how to include what is missing.