Messages: SMS Text Messaging

Clockwise Labs

Contains ads

About this app

Messages is a fast, private SMS app that sorts your text messages for you. Bank alerts, delivery updates, offers and spam each go to their own place, so the people who matter stay at the top. And what you spent this month adds itself up.

No account. No sign-in. Your text messages stay on your phone.


AN SMS INBOX THAT SORTS ITSELF

Most of the texts you get are not from people. Messages reads the sender and the wording of every new SMS and files it for you:

• Transactions — bank debits and credits, payments, order and delivery updates, bill reminders
• Promotions — offers, sales, coupons and marketing SMS, out of the way but never deleted
• Spam — prize wins, fake loan approvals and the rest, filtered out with their links switched off
• Unknown senders — anyone not in your contacts, kept apart from your real conversations

Sorting happens on your phone the moment a text arrives, with no internet lookup and nothing sent anywhere. Move a thread to another category any time and it stays put.


SEE WHAT YOU SPENT, WITHOUT TYPING IT IN

Your bank already texts you every time money moves. Messages adds it up.

Open Transactions and the month is there: what you spent, what came in, and which shops took the most, with a bar for each. It is read from the bank SMS already sitting in your inbox, on your phone. No bank login, no card number, no account to connect. Works in dollars and rupees.


EVERYTHING A TEXT MESSAGING APP SHOULD DO

• Send and receive SMS and MMS — photos, videos, audio and files
• Group text messages
• Dual SIM: see which SIM an SMS arrived on, and reply from the right one
• Schedule a text message — write it now, and it sends at the time you chose, even if your phone restarts
• Search every message you have ever received, instantly
• Block spam and report a sender in two taps
• Archive, pin, star and mute conversations
• Message pop-up: a new SMS appears over whatever you are doing
• Scan the text in a picture and paste it into a message, entirely on your phone
• Check in: let someone know you arrived safely
• Light and dark themes, and 23 languages


YOUR MESSAGES STAY YOURS

Messages has no server and no account. Every conversation, photo and file is stored on your phone, in the app's private storage and Android's own message store, and nowhere else.

• We cannot read your text messages. Nobody can, because they never leave your device.
• Your spending is worked out on the phone, from your own SMS. It is never uploaded.
• Your contacts are read on the phone so a thread shows a name instead of a number. They are never uploaded.
• App Lock puts your fingerprint, face or PIN in front of the app, and hides it from the recent-apps screen and from screenshots.

The app shows ads, which is what keeps it free. Ads never see your messages or your contacts.


SMS BACKUP AND RESTORE

Save every conversation, message, photo and setting into one file, on your phone or straight to Google Drive, and restore it on a new phone. The file is yours: the app never uploads it anywhere you did not choose.


BUILT FOR HOW PEOPLE REALLY TEXT

Messages knows the shape of the texts that fill a real inbox — the short codes and sender IDs that banks, couriers and shops send from — so bank alerts, delivery updates and promotional SMS land in the right place from the very first message, with nothing to set up.


HONEST ABOUT PERMISSIONS

Asked for when it is needed, and the app keeps working without it:

• SMS and MMS — to send, receive and show your text messages
• Contacts — so a thread shows a name and photo instead of a number
• Phone — to tell which SIM a message belongs to
• Notifications — to tell you a message arrived
• Camera and microphone — only while you attach a photo or a voice message
• Location — only when you choose to attach it to a message
• Display over other apps — only for the message pop-up, if you turn it on

Messages is a free SMS app. No subscription, and no features locked behind a paywall.