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Comment by CommitSyn | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is an idiotic decision that makes me question the decisions being made as a whole by Signal.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good default SMS app on Android?

Posted elsewhere in this thread but...

Personally like TextraSMS. Has a free ad-supported version, but I paid to remove ads when it was on sale several years ago (maybe $1).

4.4 stars. I believe it's $3 or $5 to remove ads now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra

Also surprised me the other day when a friend used an iOS reaction, and it applied it correctly on my end.

> Added support for Reactions (also known as Tapbacks) received from iOS Apple devices.

I am also using it on both devices, and I also paid for it using Google Opinion Credits :) Textra is an amazing SMS app.

I've been using QKSMS on Android 12 and haven't had any problems in about a year of use. I think its on Google Play as well.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.moez.QKSMS

Last commit was a year ago. Do you know if it is still being developed?

I'm not sure, but I haven't had any issues or want any more features than it already has so it's not an problem for me, but might be for some.

Doesn't look good... https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues/1881

The Google Messages app is pretty good. It's a little thing, but it's the only app that supports tapbacks from iOS -- so on the (many) group threads I'm on that have iPhone users, I can see loves/like reactions instead of a flood of texts that say "Jane Doe loved an image".

It's terrible. Every once in a while they decide to convince me that I really don't want to be sending an SMS but I want to use google's messenger of the month, that will inevitably be gone next month.

Huh, it's never done that to me. How often does it happen?

Every time it updates it asks me if I want to enable "messaging features" the next time it opens.

Used to happen to push duo. I installed an sms app from fdroid after that.

+1 google messages.

rcs support works well, the emoji reactions are good. the web ui for it is pretty alright. I use the quick responses and scheduled send from time to time. and it cleans up my 2fa codes automatically.

Also, it now sends emoji reactions over sms which is a nice little graceful degredation from sms.

I also use the "messages for web" sync that Google Messages offer: https://messages.google.com/web/

Really convenient to be able to respond to texts without having to take out my phone.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.smsmes... ?

This is what I'm switching to. I would have suggested Textra, but when I downloaded it just now, TrackerControl told me there are a bunch of tracking libraries in it. Simple SMS Messenger, on the other hand, not only doesn't have any tracking libraries, but doesn't ask for internet access!

I've used other tools in the Simple suite and I love them.

Although I like using F-Droid, this app is also available on the regular Play Store as well.

Update: I switched back to Textra because Simple SMS lacked a way to see timestamps for arbitrary messages. It will show occasional times when a message was received with some lull between it and the previous message. Otherwise, the timestamps are a mystery. I don't like that.

Pulse SMS is really good, but I blacklisted updates since they were bought in 2020

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/29/it-looks-like-pulse...

QKsms is open source but abandoned more than a year, so I guess Simple SMS at Fdroid should be ok, it's from the guy behind Simple Gallery

Silence is like a less polished version of Signal. The only important feature I really think it's lacking is a search function. You can export your texts to an XML file though, so to find something from a long time ago I just export to a file and use grep to search through that.

SMS Organizer by Microsoft

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

shudder

Been using this for years, I really like the Updates and finances tab.

https://i.imgur.com/hUABKGr.jpg

I've been using Chomp SMS a long time and it's still being updated.

Yeah, I like Chomp. As I recall, I first installed it because it had an optional emoji pack with the old blob emojis in it, which I was miffed to have had taken away from me in an Android update.

The provide a fairly clear rationale beyond the ideological concern: users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't, and are being hit with high fees, and they are concerned that users may believe they have privacy when they do not.

These are reasonable issues and concerns, so I don't follow why you would question all of the other decisions they make.

There are surely ways around this that don't limit the functionality of the application

As if Signal couldn't change the color of the text bubbles to some shade of, let's just say, green, to indicate when a user is chatting via SMS instead of a Signal secured message.

And then everybody and their dog would accuse them of green-shaming or whatever.

No such thing as bad PR, unless you're removing features. Having people green-shame just means there are other people that are rolling their eyes and still getting their name out there.

Couldn’t they just do something like have the sms messages in a different color than the rest? Similar to how iOS used blue for iMessage and green for texts? Signal could use an annoying red color for sms to make it even more clear.

Not sure if this is a joke given that Signal uses Blue for sms and Red for encrypted...

I am on iOS and have never seen red. Only see blue. Color can be customized though.

I didn't specifically sate "on Android" since on iOS all messages are through Signal.

> users don't know/see who is on SMS and who isn't

They could just show the literal word "SMS" in the send button.

I think that would be more obvious than wha they do now (button being grey instead of blue with a minimally changed lock symbol [1]).

[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318911#an...

so put SMS in different tab and let users turn on/off this feature in settings, done, problem solved, but I understand giving users options nowadays ain't trendy

If only there were a company that had, at some point, demonstrated that you can use indicators such as colour to indicate to users whether their messages were being transported via SMS or an E2E secure transport layer.

I guess that's just a pipe dream though.

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