The stock Graphene SMS app sucks, it lacks basic features and customization that standard SMS apps have.
I see no real need to keep it for security and privacy reasons unless someone can share legitimate information about the application for a need to keep it that is note worthy I am all ears to be educated.
I’d like to explore other privacy focused SMS alternative apps. Not services. Just the app. Thanks! I hope this helps others too. I can’t be the only one! I chose top 3 because I would rather not try 50 apps. Just the cream of the crop.
I like Fossify Messages, personally, and because I also like handling texts from my desktop, I have a Matrix bot to forward them to my Element account.
In general there are few FOSS SMS apps to try Check Quick SMS or Deku SMS on Fdroid , both are forked from QKSMS
Fossify is based imo
SMS is completely insecure from its very core. So it really doesn’t matter.
I agree but if you have a phone you need a SMS app in any case, delivery confirmation, spams and scams… (Yeah it’s not that good…😭)
Just because someone can break into your house doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lock the door
In this case, your door has no locks. So you can shut the door and it will latch closed, but there’s no lock with which to secure it. So anybody can just walk up and turn the knob and walk right in. It doesn’t matter what kind of door you use, because there’s physically no capability to lock it.
qksmsquik: https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.octoshrimpy.quik/ (works fine, last update is almost a year ago)simplefossify: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.messages/ (up to date)silence: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.smssecure.smssecure/ (no updates)
Quik SMS is a fork and continuation of QKSMS
i know, but edited for clarification 👍
As mentione SMS is by no means secure, and although silence hadn’t gotten any update, still works as a champ on Android 15.
I know you said no services but I didn’t really find any SMS apps that I enjoyed and found more satisfaction with an alternative service so I’ll detail that below for anyone curious. My favorite of the regular SMS apps had to be QKSMS though - nice customization options and it has message scheduling.
If you’re looking for a higher level of privacy (the most you’ve get with an insecure protocol like SMS at least), I’d check out porting your number to https://jmp.chat/ with https://cheogram.com/ as a VOIP number. You save a lot of money and at least after initial setup, you don’t have to stick to Cheogram as your XMPP app - I switched to Monocles which is still open source and available on F-Droid and all of my VOIP numbers still work fine. Same said for desktop - I use Dino and have access to all of my texts right on desktop.
Then you can just use a data only SIM on your device to stay in touch when you’re out and about if you’d like. That SIM still has to drawbacks of basically being connected to your identity through your IMEI but at least presumably most of the time while you are connected to WiFi, you have the option of disabling the SIM if you’d like and be able to use your phone number without giving your location data to your carrier. I choose to keep airplane mode on all the time and just have the data only sim for emergencies. If you want to go harder, jmp also accepts cryptocurrency as well as some data only SIM providers such as https://silent.link/ so you could completely use decentralized currency to pay for your phone service which is kind of cool.
I believe it is possible to self host the XMP server that is interfacing with your SMS number as well but at the end of the day SMS is already basically cleartext across the network with how many eyes are on it so I felt comfortable just trusting the servers they provide as part of the subscription.
On my generic android I am using Textra pro version. I do not know how good it is by comparison to other apps, but they keep updating and I am used to it.
I’ve been using it for years and it is indeed amazing but as I move away from Google and apps that rely on the play store/services I’m likely going to drop it soon for a FOSS alternative.
Textra
This looks promising as a stock GrapheneOS message app replacement. One of the things that kinda irks me about the stock app is that reactions are displayed as text and the user doesn’t have the ability to react to messages. With Textra both are possible. Thanks for the suggestion!
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From f-droid you can download ‘Simple SMS Messenger’ they should work for basic stuff like getting sms notifications from businesses. For personal chats it’s better to look into end-to-end encrypted messengers.
Fossify SMS is better, since SimpleMobileTools went proprietary after an aquisition a few years ago.
I’m looking for this too and am interested in any answers. The stock GrapheneOS messaging app is okay for just text messaging for me, but I’d also like to be able to have an interface to it on my PC, either in the web browser or as a separate app. Google Messages for Web is really the only thing I miss from enshittified Google Android. I wish Signal didn’t remove their capabilities for making Signal the default SMS app on phones, but they likely had good reasons to do so.
I’ll share this post on the Fediverse; maybe we’ll get more traffic and thus more answers that way. To be honest, though, I’m not expecting anything that satisfies.
I don’t think there are any. They all suck.
