What is Reddit's opinion of QKSMS?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Ah, gotcha. There have been quite a few changes made to the MMS / group messaging over the last few months (full changelog here), so there's a good chance this has been improved in the midst of all that.

Let me know what you think if you ever end up giving it another shot!

Both Koler and QKSMS are open-source, meaning that anyone is free to take a look at their code. If you are really paranoid about security, then there's no better comfort in you vetting the code yourself.

If you aren't able to read code though then you'll have to trust that the others who could read code would vet the codebase for everyone else and make noise if they find issues. A recent example of this is Audacity adding Google telemetry (link here). This is a feature of open-source software and it's what makes it attractive.

On the other hand, closed-source, proprietary software runs code that only the developers know what it does.

It comes down to a matter of trust. Do you trust that larger tech for-profit corporations like Google or Microsoft have your best interests in mind or do you prefer to trust the few hundreds of open-source contributors and reviewers who also use the same software as you? Only you can make that choice.

Either way, I hope you pick the best choice for you. :)

Fair enough. This feature is on the to do list, which you can see here:

https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/projects/2

New versions are being released regularly, so you may want to keep an eye on it.

Not abandoned. I'm still working on it, albeit more slowly than before

I pushed out an updated a few weeks ago, but there were some new bugs introduced so I had to halt the rollout. I'm still trying to sort out what the problem is, once I do I'll push out a fixed version

You can check the Github commits for a more accurate picture on how actively I'm working on the app: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/commits/master

It's not done with setTheme, but rather with a view colors that are updated on a preference change.

You might find it interesting to dig into QKSMS, which is an opensource SMS app. They have a LiveViewManager iirc, enabling views to update on certain preference changes (like theme color) and animate to them.

Edit:

LiveViewManager

Example usage

        LiveViewManager.registerView(QKPreference.BACKGROUND, this, key -> {

            // Update the background color. This code is important during the welcome screen setup, when the activity

            // in the ThemeManager isn't the MainActivity

            mRoot.setBackgroundColor(ThemeManager.getBackgroundColor());

        });

Edit2: seems like the guy who actually did research got it right :3 I guess I didn't think they could actually reload the activity that fast.

I personnaly use QKSMS. It can do anything I need. However you should be warned that you won't have RCS chat features (just like any other third party SMS app, not just QKSMS) if you enabled them on Google Messages.

If by secure you expect encrypted, QKSMS is not for you because sms are not encrypted by themselves (your ISP can read any message you send/receive). You should consider something like Signal instead.

Yep, here are the events that are being tracked so far: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=analyticsManager.track&type=

That's great to hear, I'm glad you're liking it so far!

I haven't looked into the code too much, but it seems pretty cleanly separated with modules and is a pretty popular (>500k downloads), open source app: QKSMS

https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms

From /u/moezz

Third party messaging apps on android can not implement RCS without the API from google, which they have not made public only worked with certain OEMs hence its extremely limited availability on android at present.

See this comment on Github from one the of the largest third party non OEM SMS apps on android. https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues/1522#issuecomment-557354828

Yeah I noticed the same issue. This is most likely a problem with how QKSms works and nothing else. You can probably raise an Issue on their Github here: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues

For now I just leave the default camera enabled for this reason

Not sure for e-mails, i'm sure programs can do that, but i'm glad that some time back, i've found an open source android SMS app that can send scheduled messages. That was my dealbreaker when finding a replacement app for stock (also that it's open source - transparent). If i have to ask someone something in the morning or on the specific day, i just set the date and time and the phone will automatically send sms.

https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms

On LineageOS 15.1 with my Nexus 6/shamu, I've had issues with the stock messenger app sometimes forgetting notifications, especially if I receive a message from a person, then someone else sends a message later. It seems to be related with collapsing messages from different senders into one notification "stack" or expandable grouping.

I have no idea how to fix it, alas, but I have been happy with switching to the open-source QKSMS+ via F-Droid (also on Google Play).

I suspect this issue isn't specific to the Nexus 6, but I don't know.

Hey, sorry for the late response!

You are correct - QKSMS currently doesn't know how to compress GIFs. You can subscribe to this issue here if you want to be notified once this has been resolved: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues/1128

Since the app is open source, I think that Github might be a more appropriate place for this. I use Issues as my main source of truth for what I need to work on (feature requests or bug reports), you can subscribe for notifications about new releases, and this means that there's one less thing I have to check, leaving more time for me to actually work on the app :)

That being said, if people would like to submit issues there, I wouldn't mind making it a part of my routine to check it every so often. I just don't think I have the bandwidth at the moment to also treat it as a place where I'm giving updates and constantly engaging

> Should I just try downloading a different messaging app?

Anything is better than the default SMS app in my opinion. I use QKSMS and it works really well. The dev is highly active, very responsive in the issue tracker, and pretty organized.

You'd have to take the code that is on that repository and (assuming it works - I haven't tested it) port it to Java and incorporate it into the messenger app. Best bet is to look up an open source app for messaging and integrating it yourself unfortunately. I don't think LineageOS will come with out of the box support for freedom pop.

Edit: Try this: https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms

QKSMS has amazing theming and is open source. Check out what they do, IIRC they use a theme manager to build themes and style widgets and the UI as well as even the app icon

god dammit the bug is still open :(

https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/issues/347

so MMS is borked eh? 99.99% of the time that's cat pictures sent to/from the wife, so not mission critical stuff, but still...