To me, sometimes it’s incredible when seemingly experienced technology journalists have no clue what they’re talking about. In this scenario, it’s this howtogeek article covering the differences between Samsung Messages and Google Messages, written by a ‘senior writer’ named Bertel King.

the author

A bit of snooping background on this man. His website claims to be a senior writer and have over a decade of experience of writing for different websites (despite majoring in History and Government). Interestingly enough, he doesn’t have any social media, and the only way to reach him is by email. Except he doesn’t give his email. His ‘email’ is one of those forms that routes responses to your email you fill out on his website. Oh, and when you send the form, it redirects you to Formspree, his form-to-email service with a message that the form isn’t set up yet.

strange.

the article

The article starts off very well, explaining how Google Messages has now replaced Samsung Messages on all major Samsung phones in the US. This is because Samsung Messages relied on the carrier for sending RCS (Google’s iMessage equivalent) and it was difficult to maintain. Meanwhile, Google relies on its own service, Jibe for sending RCS messages. In short, this doesn’t really matter if you don’t plan on using RCS messages, but it’s still important to note that Samsung Messages is deprecated.
The article claims a reason to continue to use Samsung Messages is because it follows the One UI design language. This doesn’t make any sense. Why? Because in the end, all users want to use the most stable, useful version of a piece of software. Samsung Messages doesn’t meet these requirements as it is both deprecated and doesn’t support RCS chats. Users do not care if the design is more consistent with Samsung Messages when it is less useful. The article claims users ‘want their core phone apps to look and feel the same’, but this also does not make sense since Samsung Messages no longer even follows the newest version of One UI, and never will since it will never be updated again. strange.
After explaining how Samsung Messages has categories to help you organize your messages, it claims that Samsung Messages has ‘no google bloat’. This point is even more ridiculous. It suggests that Google Messages has bloat. Fortunately, this is not the case. In programming, bloatware is software typically with large, often unused additional features. An example of this is Microsoft’s Windows 11, specifically items such as the weather app or widgets. The article, however, claims there is bloat simply because ‘There’s Google branding at the top, and hitting the menu button pulls up your Google accounts’. Seems like the author with decades of experience doesn’t understand what software bloat is. strange.
After making this point, the author explains the features of Google Messages. He claims it can be difficult to get used to read receipts and typing indicators, both features that can be easily toggled off in the settings pane. In reality, Bertel is explaining the features of the RCS protocol, not the Google Messages app. Thousands of articles on Android Police and he doesn’t understand the difference?? strange.

conclusion

I have a lot of trouble understanding what’s going on with this writer. Getting paid by Samsung to promote their deprecated products? Probably not. Clueless regarding messaging apps? Probably not. So I’ll give my own take on this debate in one simple sentence. If you want a functional and future-proof messaging solution on your Samsung device, use Google Messages.