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Google Messages has surpassed five billion installs globally. The app has hit the milestone just over three years after reaching one billion downloads in May 2020. Previously called Android Messages, it reached 100 million global downloads in October 2017. All of these figures include pre-installed apps.
The Google Messages app has been installed over 5 billion times
The Google Play Store doesn’t show the exact download count for apps. Instead, it shows milestone increments such as one million, five million, ten million, 100 million, one billion, etc. You’ll find this statistic for pretty much every app on the store. Gmail became the world’s first Android app to reach one billion installs in May 2014. It went on to surpass ten billion installs in January 2022. Google Maps reached the “ten billion” milestone in November 2021.
Both of these apps benefitted from being pre-installed on most Android phones sold around the world. Google Messages, on the other hand, hasn’t been the default messaging app on Android for the longest. Apart from Google Pixels phones and devices from a few other brands, the majority of Android devices primarily used other messaging apps until recently. This included Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone company for the past several years.
This has changed over the past few years. Google Messages is now the default messaging app on most of the devices from many Android OEMs, including Samsung. Google’s rapid rollout of RCS (Rich Communication Services) through Messages has helped it gain popularity. RCS offers modern messaging features such as read receipts, typing indicators, and end-to-end encryption, making it a massive upgrade over the old-school SMS and MMS standards.
Since RCS is a messaging standard and not a proprietary service from Google, other third-party messaging platforms can also adopt it. Some have already adopted the standard. However, Google Messages is still the primary gateway to RCS on Android. Features like desktop sync via a web client make it the default choice of many users. The upcoming multi-device support could add to its popularity, helping it surpass ten billion installs over the next few years.
Google is lobbying Apple to support RCS on iPhones
RCS may have many benefits over SMS and MMS messaging, but Apple has yet to support it on iPhones. As such, cross-platform messaging between Android and iOS still relies on age-old standards. Google has been lobbying Apple to change this with several public campaigns over the years, often mocking it for its reluctance, but the latter hasn’t budged. It remains to be seen whether the “five billion” milestone makes Apple change its mind.