Moving Away from Google Messages

Privacy Questions
1

I’m currently looking into moving away from Google Messages since I don’t really need RCS, but I noticed that the Android SMS DB doesn’t seem to have all the messages I’ve received in Google Messages. Basically, with all the different SMS/MMS apps I’ve tried, I’m missing entire conversations with some of my contacts (non-RCS conversations, just so we’re clear). Has anyone else had this issue? Does Google Messages just not sync its messages properly or something?

2

I had to transfer messages from an old device before and this app worked perfectly for me. You should be able to use it to transfer messages from your old messages app to your new one.

1 Like
3

I’ve previously used this app when swapping phones, but I wasn’t sure if it’d make sense in this case. Does it do something unique such that QUIK or Fossify will actually pick up everything after exporting and importing?

4

Keeping an eye on this thread. My assumption is that SMS storage is completely separate from RCS messages, which are end-to-end encrypted with Google’s proprietary extension to the RCS standard. My expectation would be that merging the two back down to SMS is not possible; maybe even for security reasons.

But I don’t know because I’ve never used RCS.

5

My main issue is that non-RCS messages aren’t getting copied. The RCS ones seem to copy mostly fine for whatever reason.

I ended up using SMS I/E again, and basically it just ended up causing annoying duplication in Google Messages (despite wiping messages in SMS I/E), so clearly Google Messages isn’t solely using the SMS DB and has its own collection of messages. I don’t really understand what its criteria are for putting things in the DB though, since it seems pretty much random to me.

Also, most (all?) group conversations have my number added as a participant now, so if someone knows how to fix that (in QUIK or another app that can mess with the DB), I’d appreciate it. If someone knows how to just move messages into different conversations, that’d be helpful too, since some of the messages are now mixed up.