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.
Edit: I tried several. Fossify seems to be the best overall, I encourage others interested to try it on F-Droid. Thanks everyone!
SMS is completely insecure from its very core. So it really doesn’t matter.
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.
I don’t think there are any. They all suck.
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.
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.
qksms: https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.octoshrimpy.quik/ (works fine but no updates)
simple fossify: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.messages/ (up to date)
silence: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.smssecure.smssecure/ (no updates)
