After initially being released back in November 2016 the small development team behind the excellent Pulse SMS have this week announced that the Android version of Pulse is now open source. Read more
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/pulse-sms-02-01-2020/
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It’s always nice to see such turns on the bright side. The question is how better is Pulse SMS than QKSMS and whether it will be available in F-Droid without trackers.
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Let’s hope, as it currently contains a couple goolag trackers in the current version released 01/01/2020
Pulse has a nice user interface with lots of options …was checking it out today… there are a couple of trackers as you mention
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Pulse also allows syncing of sms messages with desktop/laptop - a pretty cool feature!
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Signal does this also as far as im aware?
Just the Signal messages I believe not the sms (not sure)
You are correct, Signal desktop only syncs with Signal encrypted msgs, not cellular based unencrypted sms/mms msgs
You wrote that it is a small development team. The article indicates that it is one person.
Correct me if I am wrong, but for Pulse to enable message access across devices, that must mean that the messages are centrally stored somewhere on a server - right?
If that is true… What is the reliability of that server? What is the quality of security and access to that server? Are the messages encrypted on that server? Can the developer read the messages on that server? And all this can all be adequately managed by just one person?
I am not in any way implying that the Pulse developer is doing anything wrong or failing in any way. I have no evidence or reason to think that. But, I am not a tech person, I just wonder about these things. Can someone who knows these things tell me, is it realistic that a one man operation can properly safeguard messages?
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Now it is fully open sourced maybe /e/ team can fork it for V1 (and remove the g-devil trackers) and then it adds an extra feature of desktop client support for /e/ sms. Thoughts?
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FYI, to sync with desktop/laptop you need a paid account. The prices are very, very reasonable but you can only sign-up for an account using your android phone and the sign-up attempts an in-app purchase, which I haven’t managed to get to work using microG. I’m on lineage 17.1 w/microG and aurora app store (can’t properly run e yet) so I’d love to hear if someone managed to sign up for an acct from e!
What a pity… I expected this feature would work under bluetooth or wifi (through KDE connect or stuff), but it ends up on centralized servers? Maybe w/e/ can done this…
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Great news😑
Now to find another foss sms client