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Ask HN: What's a Good SMS App for Android?

16 points by nstbayless ↗ HN
Now that Signal is removing support for SMS, I'm anticipating an exodus as Signal users search for alternative SMS apps. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I don't want to use the default Android SMS app, because apparently it will soon support sending and parsing iOS fallback messages (i.e. 'Liked "..."'). I just want plain, standards-compliant SMS, with no risk of accidentally sending fallback messages. Plus, I don't agree with the notion that Apple should be able to bully others into recognizing their SMS extension features.

10 comments

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nstbayless
"Silence" apparently does what Signal used to: https://silence.im/#download -- unencrypted SMS messages, and encrypted SMS for others who use the same app.
ajvs
Hasn't been updated in 3 years.
mytdi
I am using it and really loving it, but yes, it's concerning that it hasn't been updated in a while and the project might abandoned.
tristan957
I use Pulse SMS and paid for the lifetime access to text from any device like a web browser for instance. I used to use Textra, but dropped it a few years ago for reasons I cannot recall.
josephcsible
> Plus, I don't agree with the notion that Apple should be able to bully others into recognizing their SMS extension features.

If doing so wouldn't require any proprietary code, then why do you think that's a bad thing?

stjohnswarts
textra is pretty good, at least when I was using Android.
i13e
QKSMS, available on fdroid and Google Play, is the gold standard for SMS. It is free and open source:

https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms

mytdi
Looks interesting, but doesn't look like it has an option for end-to-end encryption.
tarunmuvvala
SMS organizer by Microsoft is good on Andriod.