Samsung discontinued its Messages app earlier this year, leaving Galaxy owners without the One UI messaging experience they’d grown used to. The Android community tends to right these wrongs, and a replacement app that recreates the app closely has been released—it even works with RCS.

What’s Messages by OzarksMade?

A One UI lookalike built from scratch by an independent developer

Samsung Messages was never just another preinstalled app taking up space on a Galaxy phone. It matched the Galaxy theme, used rounded cards, and organized conversations into categories that made it feel more polished than most alternatives, including Google Messages. When Samsung pulled it from the Play Store, that interface disappeared overnight, along with the habits people had built around it. A few weeks later, a developer released Messages by OzarksMade, an app that sets out to recreate what Samsung dropped, right down to the visual details.

Personally, I’ve always been more of a Google Messages guy. But Samsung Messages had its well-deserved appeal. So I gave this a go.

The app mirrors Samsung’s design closely. It uses the same rounded cards, a collapsing title bar, chip-style category filters, and bubble styling that all appear modeled directly on Samsung’s original layout. It also pulls in the phone’s One UI color palette and Galaxy Theme automatically, including the app icon on the home screen, so it blends in as if it belongs there. The developer is upfront that this is not an official Samsung product, just an independent project built to fill the gap Samsung left behind.

The more interesting part is how the app handles RCS, since Google doesn’t allow third-party developers to plug directly into its RCS network. Messages by OzarksMade works around this through what the developer calls Companion Mode. Google Messages stays installed and runs in the background as the RCS engine, while Messages by OzarksMade becomes the app people actually open and use for daily messaging. This is effectively the same setup Samsung Messages relied on, since Galaxy phones have always routed RCS through Google’s Jibe infrastructure behind the scenes.

What’s the catch?

The beta is real, but getting in takes a few extra steps

Samsung phone with google messages iconCredit: Cory Gunther / How-To Geek

As nice as this app is, mimicking most of Samsung Messages’ features and adding a few of its own, it has one important catch for now. The app is currently in beta and only available in the United States—the process to get it isn’t as simple as searching the Play Store. Interested users first need to join the Messages by OzarksMade Google group using the same Google account tied to their phone. Only after doing that does the Play Store listing become visible and installable.

Once someone joins the group, the Play Store listing shows a price of $0.99. Beta testers, however, will see a “Test Card, always approves” payment option instead of a real charge, meaning the app doesn’t actually cost anything during this phase. Bringing us to the real catch: the fact that it’s set up like this probably means that this will change once the app moves out of beta, so anyone installing it now should treat the current terms as temporary rather than permanent.

Even if that’s the case, though, it’s just a dollar, and there’s nothing wrong with supporting your devs.

Should you use it?

A solid option for anyone who misses the old layout

Illustration of a phone with the Samsung Messages and Google Messages logos, with arrows between the logos indicating a switch.Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek

Whether Messages by OzarksMade is worth installing depends largely on how attached someone was to Samsung’s original messaging app. For people who relied on that layout daily and never fully adjusted to Google Messages or other alternatives, this app comes closer than anything else currently available to replicating that experience, both visually and functionally. The feature set already covers most of what Samsung Messages offers, and in some cases goes further with additions like foldable-specific layouts and branded business chat entries.

That said, there are real caveats worth weighing before joining the beta. The app is not affiliated with Samsung, and its close visual resemblance to Samsung’s branding introduces some risk that Samsung could eventually push back on it, whether through a takedown request or some other action. There’s no indication that’s happened yet, but it remains a possibility given how closely the app borrows from Samsung’s design language. The beta process itself, requiring a Google group signup before the Play Store listing appears, also adds friction that casual users might not bother with.

For anyone who’s simply curious rather than deeply attached to the old app, joining the beta costs nothing right now and offers a low-risk way to see whether it holds up. For those willing to move on entirely, plenty of other messaging apps exist that don’t carry the same uncertainty. The right choice really comes down to how much that familiar Samsung layout is worth to the person deciding.

Samsung Messages lives on, unofficially, at least for now

Messages by OzarksMade won’t replace Samsung’s app in any official capacity, but it comes closer than anything else available. For Galaxy users missing that familiar layout, it’s worth a look, with the understanding that its long-term future isn’t guaranteed.