SwiftSMS - Simply sending Beautiful Webtexts

First of all, I should disclose that I wrote an SMS client replacement app a few years back, it's on the Play market, but it was my first published app and I've always treated it more as a hobby/sandbox than a serious product so it's as buggy as Hell and make no apology for that. Someday I may rewrite it, if I get time.

Anyhow, SwiftSMS...

One Client to Rule them All... What Kavrocks says about a default app is very true. No one wants to have to use multiple clients to send to people and then go to another to read incoming messages.

Thing is that I discovered it can get very complicated, very quickly; for example you're using one outgoing provider as your default, but it doesn't work well (or at all) for certain networks, or alternatively you can send for free to a certain network. So you want to be able to handle that you can override your default outgoing provider, without having to fiddle with settings, which is another turn-off.

Also, doing the various views is a bit of a pain, and require that you think carefully about how your user interacts with your app - do you show group chats as a group thread or as seperate threads to multiple contacts? And under what circumstances?

Integrating with the default SMS database. This is a bit of a nightmare as Google doesn't publicly expose the full SMS database, and so while you can access messages, how you group them can be very fiddly, especially if you're trying to list out all conversation threads, as it can result in serious performance issues, from experience, due to lack of visibility on the database structure, thus resulting in some very inefficient SQL queries.

One solution is to grab a copy of all the messages from the default database and copy them into your own database, where you can have better control. However, if you do this keeping them in sync becomes an issue.

So you can either use the default database (performance issues) or a custom one (synchronization issues).

Writing SMS without being the default app on KitKat. I've not examined the changes in details, but yes, it appears it can be done. Twenty seconds on Goggle will find you a fix for that issue.

Allow for lots of providers. First thing I noticed about SwiftSMS is you have to register an account before you can do anything. Thing is the phone can already send out and receive SMS, so really you shouldn't have to. Even then, you give a limited number of potential providers (from what I can see, you're just copying Cabbage) and ignore the international market and cheap providers like Clickatell (most of my downloads are from places like Saudi Arabia, where the incumbent telco is raping everyone on the cost of SMS).

As almost all of these providers use some sort of HTTP or HTTPS, GET or POST API, you should be able write a solution that you can apply to all with the right 'script'. Only advice I'd give is don't try to be too clever about managing providers, just include them as part of the APK. I set up a system for remote updating, via pre-Froyo 'push', and it was way more trouble that it was worth.

Features, features, features, but not too many features. Be careful about how many you put in, as it can make the whole app into an unmanageable monster before long.

Some I've found were popular and genuinely useful were:

• Having the phone act as a Web server over a WiFi network, allowing you to send (and ideally read) SMS using a Web interface.
• The option to silence incoming notifications during certain hours (e.g. at night).
• Dynamic sending options; for example that you over-ride the default send provider for another, based upon the recipient, if you're roaming or if you lack internet connectivity (or the server you're connecting to is down).

You've a good UI. At least from what I have seen, it's clean and friendly, but there's not much there - more correctly, outside of sending SMS it doesn't do much. TBH, the UI on it's own isn't going to attract that many people. For them to adopt SwiftSMS, you need to convince them to dump their current client and you're not there yet.

Fluffy88 wrote: »

Hopefully in another release we will provide cross device sync.

Not sure it can be done with the same release.

Once you add uses permissions such as android.permission.READ_SMS, then you're telling the app that it requires a device that can accommodate such permissions and even if the app is willing to gracefully fail on a device without such functionality, without crashing or throwing an ANR, the Play Market may not and simply rule any registered devices without SMS functionality as incompatible.

My feeling is that you most likely need a second version of the app, with that SMS functionality, and uses permissions omitted, so that it can be used by such devices.