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