Same for me! I just want these devices to work without issues. I don’t have the energy to fight the privacy concerns.
I am fascinated by this statement. Perhaps because I’m 64 and not a youngster where everything is ephemeral.
Why would I want to refer to a 7 year-old text? Because a pal sent me something vital and just messaged me to say, " Remember the client from 2019 who needed 15 Bullfrog 110V Units but could only score 8 and you came through with the other 7 plus spare parts? Now I need 26. Same specs. Still got those specs? "
If my Messages are all stored and REstored every few days, it’s a piece of cake to do a search within that person’s Message thread for “Bullfrog” and voila, I’ll find the relevant 2019 conversation.
It is simply invaluable.
I’m 67 kiddo. 
Business is, or should be, transacted over email. A medium designed for archiving and forwarding and threaded conversations involving lots of parties and meaningful thought.
Text is for "Where should we do lunch today?
I USED to agree with this sentiment.
Until things like Messenger and Slack arrived on the scene.
Now people send me all manner of attachments via Messenger.
My Dearly Beloved™ and I used to use a private Slack channel for ALL kinds of stuff. Not really private stuff. Nothing money-related. ( I don’t do money on my cell phone. On any level. At all. ) Anyway, plenty of files and stuff winging back and forth.
Until Slack altered its free accounts. Now, everything older than 90 days evaporates.
So much for Slack…
Now we use WhatsApp.
" I’m 67, kiddo. "
The hell you say !!! 
Why, you’ve always posted like a fecklish 28 year-old !!!
So now, when I open the phone symbol on my Galaxy I can press the green handset to make a phone call or press the blue box to send a text. So when this happens the blue box will now be a Google box and everything will still be integrated?
That’s totally not what the phone app looks like on my Galaxy S24 w Google’s messaging app.
Now from the Contacts app, once I select a contact there’s a green phone handset for [make a call], a blue text bubble for [send a text], a gray video camera for [make a vid call], and a couple more for contact management.
ETA:
If I open the phone app there are 3 possible screens. Either the dialing keypad, the roster of previous calls & callers, or a Contacts screen. Which works as described above.
My experience when I switched from Samsung messages to Google messages was everything inside the message app looked slightly different but worked the same. Every interaction between other apps & messaging worked exactly like before.
Bottomline:
The switchover was a total nonevent.
For the most part, a non-event.
There’s one feature that I find mighty irksome that I cannot remove. I’ve checked every hamburger and sub-menu.
I do not want little messenger circles to appear on my phone screen every time I get a text. Sure, let the Messenger icon get a tick, number, etc.
But this business of my having to sweep the messenger circles off of my screen as I am working is a waste of time. And irritating.
Anyone know where the menu is to remove the pop-ups?
And again, I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S-24 Ultra.
What is a “messenger circle”? Not being a jerk, I just don’t recognize exactly which thing you’re talking about. I have Samsung S24 too. Where is it, what color os shape is it, how big is it, etc.?
I don’t know how else to describe it. For every message that’s new, not unread, just relatively new, a small circle of that person’s icon appears. They’re piled on top of each other. Tap the top one and they line up. Tap one again and the message itself opens.
To be clear, these are living on top of my home screen. I’d love to get rid of them !!
They are…and I am looking right now… roughly 60% the size of each icon on my home screen. They can be dragged around, they move together. Color== they are the same image as the sender’s icon. Lacking an image, it is the normal “ghost” profile.
It appears that …
- This applies to the US only.
- This only applies to devices running Android 12 or later.
so I’m safe !
Hmm. Nothing like that happens at all on my device. I’m completely at a loss about what you’re describing. Sorry to be unhelpful but I have exactly zero clue.
I think they may be called “notification bubble icons”.
Click on your icon/account, select settings, and then bubbles.
You can turn them off there.
Hey thanks !!! I do believe that was it ! Did not see that set of options.
I don’t have those bubbles but I can’t get rid of the message wanting me to use Gemini. I tap “No thanks” but there is no option on the menu to delete the message itself.
I didn’t really want to switch either, but I did months ago. The two biggest problems I’ve had are:
some pics that people send don’t always come through. I have to download them to look at them. I never had that problem before, the pic just showed up. Last night I got one and it told me it couldn’t even open the thing and I would need to email it. Never seen that before.
The other thing I miss is that when I got a message the screen would turn on and I could see what the message was. That no longer happens and I have to turn on the screen myself to view the message.
Everything else seems to work about the same.