Samsung Messages and Samsung Wallet briefly marked as ‘harmful’ by Google

Ben Schoon | Oct 23 2023 - 11:19 am PT

The Samsung Messages app has been partially replaced by Google Messages for many Galaxy users, but it’s still installed on many devices. Recently, though, a lot of folks noticed that Samsung Messages was flagged as a “harmful” app by Google, as was the Samsung Wallet app.

Google Play Protect is an app on most Android phones that helps to protect devices from malicious apps, even those that are pre-installed on your device or are sideloaded. However, once in a while, the app gets things wrong.

Over the past several days, that’s been the case with Samsung Messages and Samsung Wallet, both of which have been falsely flagged as “harmful” by Google. The issue was reported on Samsung and Google forums, mostly with Wallet, from what we can see. A pop-up or notice in the Play Store (seen below) informs users that the apps are harmful and that they should be uninstalled. Thankfully, this isn’t a case of Samsung going rogue but rather an error on Google’s end.

Samsung explains in a forum post (translated) that the problem was caused by a “temporary failure” on Google’s side that has since been restored.

It has been confirmed that the phenomenon of a device being marked as a harmful app with a pop-up saying there is a device security problem when using the Samsung Messages app was caused by a temporary failure of the Google server.

It has now been restored and can be used normally.

Affected users are then given instructions to re-enable Messages or Wallet if they were uninstalled or disabled by Play Protect.