iMessage

Crack down on text message spam with SMS Shield

There’s no two ways about it: unsolicited texts are an issue. Be it outright spam, carrier notifications or simply unpalatable contacts, more often than not your phone fails to protect you from some rather unsavoury messages.

Interestingly, text message security is an unusual topic rarely broached, either because it remains forced to live a sad existence in the shadow of the seemingly more profitable email bubble, or because it’s decidedly trickier to contrive a service that genuinely satisfies text message users.

For all intents and purposes, SMS Shield has pulled off that feat. Once downloaded and set up (subscription fees range from $5.99 yearly to $0.99 monthly corresponding with a 1-year, 1/2-year and 1-month package), you can’t help but feel that your iPhone’s Messages app just battened down the hatches.

RedFailedMessages makes it easier to discern when a message fails to send

It’s never a good sight when a text fails to send in the Messages app, but sometimes the “failed message” alert isn’t as eye-catching as we want it to be, at times resulting in forgotten failed messages that leave the recipient hanging for hours.

A new free jailbreak tweak dubbed RedFailedMessages by iOS developer NeinZedd9 has the goal of making it easier to discern between successful and failed messages by turning the entire chat bubble of a failed message red.