For years, Microsoft's SMS Organizer was the first app I installed on any Android phone I used. It filtered my texts into neat categories and kept promotional messages away from my attention. It let me focus only on personal and bank messages that actually mattered.
After Microsoft announced that SMS Organizer was going away, I moved to Google Messages and realised that it still does not offer this basic feature. I like Google Messages for its clean design and RCS chats, but my personal messages get buried under offers from shopping apps and spammy services.
Why SMS Organizer's Categories Mattered So Much
Microsoft launched SMS Organizer in India back in 2017 as a Microsoft Garage project. From that time, the app used on-device machine learning classifiers to sort messages. It offered categories like Personal, Transactions and Promotions tabs.
But the feature I loved the most was the ability to control notifications for each category. I completely turned off notifications for promotional messages so my phone only alerted for personal messages, OTPs and important bank alerts.
I received multiple promotional messages daily, but they were automatically moved to the Promotions tab. In cases where such messages occasionally slipped in, I manually moved them to the promotional category to prevent future notifications. Best of all, the app could even delete them automatically after a week.
In India, where you regularly get an SMS for every bank transaction, food delivery, loan, courier service, etc., this made a huge difference to my life. Sadly, SMS Organizer has not received an update since September 2024, and in May 2026, Microsoft notified users that the app is being sunset.
Over time, the app became buggy without any updates, and I stopped getting notifications for new messages. And that is when I started looking for an alternative to SMS Organizer.
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Google Built This Feature for India and Then Took It Away
Google actually built message organisation into its Messages app. In June 2021, Google announced automatic categories for Google Messages, starting the rollout with India. It sorted texts into Personal, Transactions, OTPs and Offers on the device itself and offered to auto-delete OTPs after 24 hours.
Google even said that it built the feature for Indian users because they receive a flood of promotional messages, receipts and order confirmations.
However, the rollout in India was patchy. I remember I waited for the feature, but it never reached my phone. In early 2022, a simplified version with just Personal and Business tabs was rolled out in other countries. However, in a September 2023 update, Google removed the category tabs from Google Messages altogether. Google never gave a clear reason for the removal of this feature.
Today, you just get a leftover menu. If you open Google Messages settings, you will still find a Message organisation option, but it only shows a toggle to auto-delete OTPs after 24 hours. There are no categories and no way to separate promotional and personal messages.
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Samsung Messages Is Not the Answer Either
Since then, I have been using Samsung Messages on my Galaxy S23, but it's not a suitable replacement. Sure, it lets you create categories, but it doesn't sort messages automatically. You have to create each category yourself and keep adding conversations to the appropriate category manually, which defeats the whole purpose.
So, as a stopgap solution, whenever I receive a promotional message, I mute the thread individually. It's cumbersome, and I have to repeat this process for every new sender, but that is what I live with right now.
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I Think Advertising Is the Real Reason
I think the reason why Google doesn't offer message categorisation is to earn more revenue through its advertising business. While writing this story, I switched my default messaging app to Google Messages to check its settings. The moment I opened the app, I got an RCS notification from an unknown business trying to sell me a loan.
That pretty much sums up what Google is up to. Google wants brands to reach users through Google Messages, especially with RCS business messages in India. If Google offers a Promotions tab with muted notifications, those messages would go unread. And fewer eyeballs means less value for advertisers.
As my colleague pointed out, the spam problem in Google Messages is powered by RCS business messages. It skips TRAI's DLT filtering system, which SMS has to go through. So, you will have to completely turn off RCS or live with the spam problem or move to another messaging app like I did.
Ironically, SMS Organizer, an app Microsoft has now abandoned, did a better job at organising SMS than Google and Samsung, the two biggest companies behind Android phones. Microsoft brought this feature to Android four years before Google even tried.
So, in this AI age, my request to Google is to bring back automatic categories to Google Messages and let me turn off notifications for any category I choose. That would do much more for the user experience than shoving Gemini into Google Messages.
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