Alternative to Google's "Messages" app (for SMS) on Android?
Alternative to Google's "Messages" app (for SMS) on Android?
Does anyone know of an open-source alternative to Google's "Messages" app, which takes care of SMS/text messages on my phone?
I was looking for open-source alternatives on PlayStore and F-Droid but can't really find anything – most apps seem to target some extra purpose than simply handling SMSs.
(Edit: I'd like to stay away from the "Simple Mobile Tools" line because I don't know if it's open source, and I don't like the way they promoted some apps – forcing users to update to pro and similar.)
Cheers!
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I used to use all the Simple tools, even paid for them, unfortunately the dev changed monetization to a shitty model and I got locked out.
Since then I moved to QKSMS. Its on F-Droid and despite some initial quirks I'm very happy with it.
@youngerpants@lemmy.world @0_0@lemmy.world @InterSynth@lemmy.dbzer0.com @poudlardo@jlai.lu – thank you for QKSMS, it sounds good. Strange because it doesn't appear with an "SMS" search on F-Droid – but now I got the link :)
Note: I read some users recently complaining about it missing some SMS; let's see if that's still a problem.
The play store version is out of date (version 3.9.2, last updated 2021-02-07).
You should get it from F-Droid or Github (version 3.10.1, last updated 2023-01-16/2023-01-19).
Edit: Apparently it was only a small update and it's still practically abandoned.
This update was very small, just handling a start up crash and an error involving how question marks are handled. I would still consider this project unmaintained.
Last code update was 28th of October 2021. https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms - almost two years of no maintenance. They probably just recompiled it for some reason for fdroid.
3.10 is on a separate branch for some reason, but it's not much
Cheers, got it from F-Droid (another step in de-googling :)
This update was very small, just handling a start up crash and an error involving how question marks are handled. I would still consider this project unmaintained.
The SMS app from Simple tools is bad anyways. Group messaging is totally messed up. I threw in the towel when i responded to a group message and it sent an individual message to each person in the group.
You can fix that in settings (and I did), but it's still wild that the default setting for group texts isnt MMS. What I've found even more frustrating is that there seems to be no way to make it show you a name on the contacts in a group chat. It only shows the first letter and a random color for each individual person. Can be tough to figure out who's who even amoung my closest friends just because half their names start with the same letters.