What do you use to send and receive SMS on your computer? I’ve tried KDE Connect but found it too buggy to use daily.
Beeper bridges sms to matrix
I have signed up to Beeper’s waiting list. I hope I won’t have to wait too long…
I used Google Messages directly for a while, but then a Matrix bridge that uses Google Messages was released, so now I use that. If you want to try it, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy makes it really easy to self-host, but if you don’t want to do that, something like Beeper can probably do it.
Can it handle MMS, pictures, etc?
Yes, and also RCS.
There are multiple ways to bridge SMS to XMPP. Works nicely in my experience.
If you are US or Canada based this is also worth a look: https://jmp.chat/
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I use Pulse SMS. It has cross platform sybc for every major os, and has a decent feature set. Pretty sure its an electron app though.
What bugs are you encountering with KDE Connect?
Most of the time I can’t even send a message with it - I’ll type the message out, click send and… nothing. No indication of error, no indication of success. There’s also an issue with loading the message history right after launch. A lot of times it doesn’t work or only works partially. App on the phone has full permissions, set to unrestricted battery, etc.
Personally, I transitioned my entire family and friends to use my Google Voice number years ago. GV doesn’t support RCS still, which is annoying, but otherwise it works great. When my phone broke at the beginning of this year I was still able to send and receive texts from everyone.
Obviously, if you don’t trust Google this would be a non-starter though.
Wait it doesn’t support RCS? Isn’t google the one heavily pushing RCS?
Yep. Google Voice is the forgotten step-child that Google only remembers exists once every few years, randomly pushing a wave of updates, and then nothing(don’t let the bi-weekly bug fix updates fool you).
Though in a way I don’t mind, since they’re still providing the service for free, with zero ads, for over a decade. I’m convinced at this point that it’s the pet project of some higher up that likes the service and manages to sweep any maintenance costs under the rug so the bean counters never try to kill it.
That’s probably the last remaining service from when Google was cool.
Why would you want to send SMS from your computer? 🤷♂️
doing everything from your computer can be nicer than having to get out your phone and switch to another screen just to quickly respond to SMS
For sure, I use a computer all day, the only time I touch my phone is to answer the door. I don’t have access to iMessage on the PC but I only use Signal and WhatsApp for messaging anyway and they work nicely on my Linux desktop. Never need to fiddle with my phone.
MacOS does a nice job imo