I am looking to replace my phones text message client with something better. I am trying to make my phone clean, minimalist and less addicting (degoogling too). I even installed Niagara launcher, to give an idea of the kind of aesthetic I am looking for. Is there anything out there folks reccomend? Bonus points if its ethical and pro-privacy.
Fossify messages
YAATA is very good, sadly its abandoned and not FOSS. I’ve never seen any network request from it tho I block it these days. This is the most lightweight one I tried, much better than Textra/Chomp/etc.
QKSMS is foss and I saw some suggestions for it, but it was way too complex for my use.
You mean for SMS? Doesn’t Signal handle that as well?
Edit : nope. Signal doesn’t handle sms
Im not sure about the ethics of this company, which is Australian based, but I’ve been using Textra for probably 10 years now. It does base off the base messenger app, so messages are still put through google but I’m not sure that any apps can avoid that.
Otherwise though it’s clean and customizable. Pretty basic features like blocking, group messaging, reactions all work. The thing I like best is you can compose a message and reply directly from the notification bar. I think it’s something like $3 to remove ads forever, I paid forever ago and haven’t had any issues transferring through phones.
I don’t think any of them support RCS, for whatever that’s worth to you.
The only place I really miss that is with a fantasy football shit-talking group chat. Otherwise, I’ve tried to move away from SMS/MMS/RCS. It’s hard to pull people away from iMessage.
unfortunately as far as I know RCS is closed down. only Google messages on android and iMessage on iOS support it (maybe some other proprietary options, but no FOSS options).
I don’t use any of these suggestions, but the ones I keep hearing *about are Quik and Fossify Messages.
Edit: accidentally a word
I’ve been using the Fossify messenger for a while it is is largely fine. It does not offer proper reaction support, showing “🤣 to ‘MESSAGE’” or some such, and it doesn’t offer to copy authentication codes from a notification. Other than that, it works well.
Go to https://fmhy.net/
Almost any messaging app is better, the question is what do your friends use, and can you get them to switch.
I’m a fan of XMPP because it’s an established protocol you can host yourself (if you wanted) - this removes untrustworthy providers.
It really comes down to what’s your goal?
