Google’s AI chatbot is coming to Messages. Meanwhile, Android Auto gets some AI smarts and Google Docs will let you add handwritten comments.
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Then Google Messages is about to slide out of my phone’s installed apps list.
Wild question I never thought I’d be asking, anyone know a stripped down SMS app I can use instead of the default?
I don’t want to see AI features and I don’t wanna participate in helping anyone build a LLM
I’ve been using the Fossify SMS Messenger for a few weeks now and it does everything I need a messaging app to do.
My recommandation, stop using SMS
Switch to E2EE chats
I’ve tried, but literally everyone else I know absolutely hard refuses to switch to Signal. So, L I guess.
And here is the exact reason Signal dropping SMS was a terrible decision.
Yup. That’s the whole reason I kept using signal. I got 2 or 3 people to start using it while the rest stayed on sms. It kept all my other SMS messages in the same app. So it was seamless to transition between one or the other depending on who used what.
I actually quit using signal when it could no longer be my SMS app, just because it became too much of an annoyance to remember which people did and didn’t use signal.
Yeah. Very few of the people I know have any interest.
Up to you what you choose to share when the information goes over open air
The shit I send via sms is like “Do you want pizza tonight” or “how far away are you”. Anything more detailed gets turned into a phone call. It’d be cooler if it were Signal but alas, family habits die hard.
For sure, my family took to it because Hangouts was being deprecated and we wanted a new group chat system. Easier for them since they had already adapted to a more modern text system, but I used it as an opportunity to get them onto a more secure platform and they did!
Signal Matrix etc are the way. Good luck in the future.
I’m not sure this can be done more easily without root access as many Android services and Gapps are intertwined.
You can try this solution via ADB, this is just an example
pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.app
As for SMS app, I use QKSMS
I just saw this, it’s available on f-droid and play store
Deku SMS is an Android SMS app.
Deku SMS is being developed as a proof-of-concept for secure SMS messaging, SMS image transmission and SMS-Cloud communications.
QKSMS used to be The Answer, but they stopped development. I’ve heard Partisan SMS was an active fork, but haven’t used it myself.
I mostly settled on non-FOSS, unfortunately. Signal, Textra, Chomp for a while.
https://github.com/octoshrimpy/quik is an active fork of QKSMS
Alternatively, https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.messages/ exists
It’s not FOSS but I used Textra for years and it’s quite great. I don’t think it supports bubbles, but it’s worth checking out
Textra or Chomp SMS.
Textra is more feature rich but I had a problem setting custom notifications on Xiaomi phone so I switched to Chomp. Fun fact: both are developed by the same developer.
Now that Simple SMS Messenger by Mobile Tools has been bought, the answer is its fork, the Fossify SMS Messenger on f-droid.
I opted out of using Gemini when they launched in on my pixel 8. Will this affect me? Time to start digging.
Edit: looks like I’m in the clear until they implement this on the backend because I don’t have the Gemini app on my phone.
One can disable google assistant via adb, I would assume even if google retires the former in favor of gemini, the newer could also be disabled via similar means.
I just don’t want to use Gemini. I opted out and so far as I can tell from what I found online I don’t have to worry about this unless they bake Gemini into apps I have installed for now. Doesn’t look like I need to disable Gemini via ADB right now. And since I actually use Google Assistant, I’ll stick with it till they force me to change over.
