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.
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.
Beeper bridges sms to matrix
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/
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.
There used to be a time where you could email PhoneNumber@carrier.com
no clue if that still works or even if that was an actual thing and not a fever dream
This is what I currently use since it’s free.
I don’t understand why people in this thread try to send sms through the mobile network, I’m confused.
Is this not available outside Canada?
Most of my contacts are on Signal. So I tend to use Signal desktop. It’s not the best desktop application but it works well for what I use it for.
When I’m at work I sometimes just use scrcpy over WiFi and leave my phone in my bag. That way I SMS but also all of the other apps.
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.
MacOS does a nice job imo
I don’t because I prefer to keep my ecosystems separate.
I had a 3g modem in my cisco router that I used to use for that, but when they shut down the 3g network I was never able to find another cheap sms-only service for the 4g version of the cisco modem. (So I switched to wifi & xmpp.)
I wrote my own software to use it, talking to the raw modem interface. Which, interestingly, uses an extension of the old “AT” modem command set. Weird.
Being able to write shell scripts that access sms is fantastic, I miss it.
Pushbullet works great for exactly this
I just checked out Spacebar. Message did not deliver and phone call only opens dialer on the phone with the number entered.