Texting and Messages (Offline)

Pikcn Technologies

About this app

Messages is a fast, private SMS and MMS app for your phone — and nothing else.

No account. No sign-up. No cloud. No tracking.

THE APP HAS NO INTERNET PERMISSION
This is the part you can verify yourself. Open the app's permission list: there is no network
access. The app is technically incapable of sending your conversations anywhere, phoning home,
loading remote trackers or serving ads, because the operating system will not give it a network
socket at all. Your messages are handled on your device and handed to your mobile network the
same way the phone has always done it.

WHAT YOU GET
• A conversation list and threads rebuilt in Material 3, with a light and a dark theme
• SMS and MMS, including picture, video, voice-clip and contact-card attachments
• Group messaging
• Multi-SIM support with a per-conversation SIM selector
• Forward, share, copy, save an attachment, or open a message's delivery details
• Call the person you are texting without leaving the thread
• Archive conversations you want out of the way
• Block and unblock senders
• Per-conversation notification settings, and mark all as read
• Delivery reports and MMS auto-retrieve controls, set per SIM
• Home screen widget for one conversation or your whole list
• Full-screen viewer for received pictures
• Your messages live on this phone, so reading them needs no signal and no account
• No feeds, no promotions, no "suggestions" — just your messages

BUILT FOR PRIVACY, NOT MARKETED AS IT
• No internet permission at all
• No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising SDKs
• No contact uploading — contact names are read on-device to label conversations, and stay there
• No contact uploading, and no writing back either — contact names are read on-device to label conversations and nothing else. "Add contact" hands the number to your contacts app; this app does not write to your contacts itself
• The app never records who you message most
• Message content is excluded from cloud backup and from device-to-device transfer
• Open source under the Apache License 2.0

PERMISSIONS, AND WHY
Ten permissions, and no more. You can check the list yourself.
• SMS and MMS (five of the ten): to be your default messaging app — to receive, read, send and store messages
• Contacts (read-only): to show names and photos instead of bare phone numbers
• Phone: to know which SIM to send from and to address multi-SIM conversations
• Notifications: to tell you a message arrived
• Wake lock and run-at-startup: to finish storing a message that arrives while the phone is asleep, and to restore your unread notifications after a restart. Neither is visible as a prompt and neither reads any of your data
• No internet, no camera, no microphone, no photo permission: attachments come from the system picker, the camera app or your own recorder, each handing back one file this app is allowed to read
camera app or your own recorder, each handing back one file this app is allowed to read
• Notifications: to tell you a message arrived

Every one of these is used on your device, for the feature it belongs to, and for nothing else.

Set Messages as your default SMS app to start using it.

What’s new

New Feature: Advanced Message Screening and Blocking.

A number can now be handled four independent ways: deleted on arrival, notified without sound or vibration, kept out of your conversation list, or kept with no notification.

Rules also cover whole ranges of numbers, with an always-allowed list for exceptions, and you can screen anyone not in your Contacts.

Add a rule before a number has ever messaged you, from Settings.

Numbers you already blocked behave as before. No new permissions.