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!
I’m also interested in this since Signal stopped supporting sms for being unsecure…
Simple mobile tools pro version are completely open-source and avaliable for free on fdroid. But of course I also paid on google play to support the developer, then use everything on f-droid.
I’m all for supporting developers. Usually I test an app for a month, and if it works well, I make a regular donation (else I uninstall it).
However, while trying out the free version of “Simple Gallery” from Simple Mobile Tools, they sent an update that suddenly made it only last for 14 days, then you had to upgrade to premium. I simply don’t like this kind of behaviour, that’s why I don’t use their products.
I don’t know who’s the creator. Here’s the app – you can also see the complaints from some users:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simplemobiletools.gallery
That is really disappointing. Although it is perfectly fine for developer to ask for money, especially for FOSS app. It seems like their communication is not exactly on point.
I guess the best course of action is to try on fdroid, if you like it buy on Gplay (or just donate if it not terribly inconvenient), and continue to use the fdroid version.
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The play store version is out of date (version 3.9.2, last updated 2021-02-07).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.
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.
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.