1

I am working on an app that scans your messages and presents interesting statistics about your contacts. Right now I have it running on my laptop scanning an iPhone SMS database. I want to create an app that will allow people to scan their own messages from their phone. I know this is not possible on iPhone so I am focussing on Android. Here are the kinds of stats we are calculating:

http://cl.ly/460S3y3Q3F200o1W2X0Y

I have read this answer:

How can I read SMS messages from the device programmatically in Android?

But just wanted to double-check that it is still possible to access the messages on Android phones from within an Android app.

Is that possible?

Thanks!

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Richard Burton
  • 2,230
  • 6
  • 34
  • 49

1 Answers1

1

There is no publicly available API on Android SDK that allows you to read the user's SMS messages from within an app.

As you've found, there are ways in which you can obtain the information using unofficial / undocumented calls. Google themselves do not recommend you do this, because it's not guaranteed to work across all phones, or all versions of Android.

So to answer your question: yes, it's technically possible, but probably ill-advised if you're looking to publish your app and have it work successfully across all devices.

lxt
  • 31,146
  • 5
  • 78
  • 83
  • I cannot thank you enough for this answer. Is there any way I can get in touch with you to ask a couple more questions? Thanks! – Richard Burton Jan 11 '12 at 20:22
  • If you have more questions I'd recommend just posting them on StackOverflow, that way other people can get benefit from them as well :) – lxt Jan 11 '12 at 20:43
  • 1
    Well I wanted to ask your opinion on whether or not to forge ahead with building the app? I did not think that would be the best SO question :) The stats on my messages are amazing and I would love to make it easy for people to calculate them too. – Richard Burton Jan 11 '12 at 22:23