SMS

GV Extension Adds Native Google Voice SMS Functionality to the iPhone

Guest Author ∙ Updated April 3, 2018

Now that Google Voice is back on the iPhone (natively), many of us are using the app to send SMS messages. Still, since there is no real way to set an app as a default SMS handler, we found ourselves using both the SMS app and whichever GV app we found most useful.

No more! There's a new tweak in Cydia that merges the two. SMS GV Extension sets your Google Voice account as the default handler of text messages. Now when you send or receive text messages, it will be exclusively handled through the Google Voice API, and not your text messaging plan through your carrier.

For some of you, this is awesome. But there is a huge limitation with this solution...

Angry Birds SMS Tones Cause Uncontrollable Urge to Smash Things

Guest Author ∙ October 21, 2010

Can't get enough Angry Birds? As if the movie, toys, and recent news regarding Rovio (or rather, non-news) weren't enough to ruffle your happy feathers, you can also download Angry Birds SMS tones in Cydia - for free!

Search for "Angry Birds SMS" and you'll be on your way to feeding your block-busting, bird-flying addiction. Now you don't have to even play the game to hear the cry of the Boomerang Bird or Zooming Yellow Bird, just tell your friends to text you non-stop!

Another Great Jailbreak App Falls by the Wayside: QuickReply for SMS is “Depreciated” but not “Dead”

Guest Author ∙ October 12, 2010

After jailbreaking with Limera1n, one of the first apps I went to reinstall was QuickReply for SMS. QR is an app that allows you to reply to incoming text messages no matter where you are on your phone — without ever having to leave the current app.

I was disappointed to see the headline in the app description (now about a month old) that QuickReply is “depreciated, not dead, depreciated.” Author Gaurav Khanna goes on to explain that he’s dropped all support for QuickReply for SMS, meaning the bugs and problems with it are here to stay.

What Features Will Never Come to the iPhone?

Guest Author ∙ September 20, 2010

Reality can suck sometimes. As bad as the truth can be however it is usually almost always best to come to terms with certain aspects of reality. As far as this piece is concerned it's iPhone's reality.

We always spend lots of time trying to dig through the rumors when a new iPhone or version of iOS is released and pinpoint the newest features. What we spend comparatively less time on is coming clean on what features we know the iPhone will never get..

Man Watches His House Get Robbed on His iPhone

Guest Author ∙ Updated February 6, 2016

Vincent Hunter was visiting relatives in Connecticut when his iPhone sounded an alert that his motion detectors were going haywire in his Dallas home.

When he opened the app on his iPhone he witnessed two burglars attempting to break an entering as he dialed 911.

iCam was the application he had installed on his phone, which is available in the App Store for $4.99. The app allows you to stream live video to your iPhone from up to 4 different webcams.

How to Send SMS from Your iPad

Sébastien Page ∙ August 20, 2010

Want to send SMS from your iPad? There is an app for that, assuming you have a jailbroken iPad 3G. SwirlyMessage is a new jailbreak application by the developer of SwirlyMMS that allows you to send and receive real SMS and MMS on your iPad 3G.

In order to use SwirlyMessage, you need a jailbroken iPad 3G, and make sure that your carrier data plan allows for sending sending SMS and/or MMS. I don't have an iPad 3G so I wasn't able to try this application but from what I understand, SwirlyMessage simply provides an interface to send SMS through your carrier. If that's the case, extra cost for each SMS sent/received might apply.

You can download SwirlyMessage from Cydia for $12. Please let us know what you think of this application should you decide to give it a try.

Jailbroken iPad 3G Sends SMS

Sébastien Page ∙ May 2, 2010

Dev Team member MuscleNerd managed to send text messages from a jailbroken iPad 3G. According to MuscleNerd, The MobileSMS.app from the iPhone doesn't run properly on the iPad so he had to use raw command lines via Terminal.

Since the AT&T plan that comes with the iPad 3G doesn't allow to send SMS, MuscleNerd used a T-Mobile SIM card that he cut down into a MicroSIM.

This is just the beginning. I'm sure we'll see more and more of these hacks

iPhone, Text Messaging & Trouble

Guest Author ∙ April 10, 2010

My absolute #1 use of my iPhone is text messaging. I am an admitted text junkie. I awaken to texts, go to sleep to texts, and spend a good part of my day replying to friends, coworkers, even my daughter from the yard or bedroom rather than yelling out to each other. But sometimes, texts can get you into trouble...

No, I’m not talking about embarrassing drunken texts to exes, or things accidentally sent to the wrong person. What I’m talking about here is inflection. A simple matter of getting your point across, whether it’s sarcastic, serious, funny, etc. This weekend yet again, things with a text buddy got a little strained because of lack of inflection. And so... we back up, explain ourselves, and wish we had called instead.

So this made me wonder, as I have wondered before, why is there no app, be it jailbreak or legit, that allows us to enable bold and italics on the iPhone? There are literally tons of text related apps, apps that allow me to change the fonts and colors, apps (and the actual phone itself) offering dozens of languages and emoji icons.

But so far I have found no app that enables bold or italics. All caps (which tends to be my go to) can be worse because then I’m yelling. But really, I’m not yelling, I just need emphasis or some inflection for the idea I am trying to convey. Granted, I’m no techie, so perhaps there is a simple technical reason that this can’t be done, but with all the amazing things this phone can do I am pretty surprised that this isn’t one of them. And, I am even more surprised that I don’t hear more people expressing an interest in wanting this kind of app.

Every once in awhile I look through the new font/text apps to see if anyone offers it but with the sheer volume of things available maybe I am just not finding it? I will say this, it is something that I would pay a decent price for if it were available.

Feel free to reply if you have alienated someone via text message... just be careful how you word it!

How to Create Custom Text Message Ringtones On Your iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ December 19, 2009

Have you ever wanted to create your own custom text message ringtone for your iPhone? I know I have! Today I found a great tutorial that explains exactly how to do it.

Go to this article on iClarified and check it out. I haven't tried it myself since I'm traveling and don't really have time to "experiment" but I am hoping that some of you will try it and share some feedback.

Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Hackers Want to Hijack Your iPhone Via SMS

Sébastien Page ∙ July 29, 2009

If you receive a strange looking SMS on your iPhone this Thursday, you'd better turn it off right away as it might enable hackers to infect your iPhone and take control of it. That's what a Forbes article is reporting today anyways.

Using a flaw they've found in the iPhone's handling of text messages, the researchers say they'll demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS bursts that can give a hacker complete power over any of the smart phone's functions. That includes dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone and, most importantly, sending more text messages to further propagate a mass-gadget hijacking.

Why would they do that? Simply to show Apple how vulnerable this iPhone bug really is. Apparently, the hackers notified Apple about a month ago, but Apple didn't bother responding to them.

We've known about this SMS bug for a while now and Apple will probably release the patch in the next OS update 3.1, supposed to be available sometimes in September (that's what the rumor says).

I think the chances you receive such a SMS are pretty thin, but you never know...

Hide SMS Preview in iPhone OS 3.0

Sébastien Page ∙ June 25, 2009

Imagine you're having a wonderful dinner at a fancy restaurant with your wife or fiance. As usual, you put your iPhone on the table so the others can see what a cool kid you are. All the sudden, the following text message arrives on your iPhone. Before you have time to hit "close", your wife has already ripped your head off.

This accident likely happened hundreds if not thousands of times since the iPhone came out in 2007. Until then, there was nothing you could do. A few jailbreak applications allowed you to hide this but for some reason, Apple never felt it was a feature worth including in the iPhone OS.

Things have changed with the release of the 3.0 firmware which now allows you to hide the preview of any incoming SMS.

To activate this feature, simply go to Settings > Messages > and turn "Show Preview" off. As you can see on the image above, Apple also added a feature that will alert you two more times after receiving a SMS if you don't read it right away. This is a feature that has also been available for a long time to jailbreakers.

Hiding the preview of an SMS won't completely hide it from showing up on your springboard. You will still get a popup showing the name of the sender and "text message", with the option for you to view the SMS or just close the popup.

That was a much needed option but I think it's too bad you still see the name of the sender (or his phone number if not in your contacts). It's a matter of privacy. A name showing up on your iPhone can still lead to awkward moments...

Have you ever had an awkward because of a SMS arriving on your iPhone? If so, please share it with us in the comments.

iRealSMS has potential… if only it didn’t mess up my iPhone

Sébastien Page ∙ Updated January 23, 2016

A new application called iRealSMS 2.0 is available since this morning in Cydia. Earlier this week I had reviewed mySMS and was really impressed with it so I decided to give a try to iRealSMS too. Looking at some of the features available, I was already salivating over iRealSMS...

FULL app in Landscape Mode Your SMS messages organized in folders: Inbox, Drafts, Templates, Outbox, Sent Saving messages as drafts or templates Search messages by sender's name and text Reply, forward and delete individual messages Delete all messages or delete per folder Big text field - both for reading and writing SMS Turn on/off keyboard autoCorrection and autoCapitalization Automatically request sent notification via notification code SMS alerts can be deactivated -> no "new SMS" alerts Adding contact details to SMS

I hurried to install iRealSMS on my iPhone and finally launched the app. Right away I was welcome with a "this is a demo verion" message asking me to register. I chose the "demo version" to try it out and another message popped up saying that since I chose the demo version, features will be limited. Ok, I can understand that, no problem.

I finally get passed all the messages and I am now fully ready to try iRealSMS. However, I got immediately turned off by the limitations of the demo version. All my SMS showed as "demo" so I was really unable to read any text message. Very unconvenient, even for just a demo version.

Not discouraged yet, I started playing with the app anyways and explore a little more these features. You can view your SMS in conversation mode or in a timeline, which is actually my preferred mode. Once you've viewed a text message, you can forward this text message or simply delete it. So far, so good.

A very interesting feature is that you can search your SMS. Let's say you have 1,000 of them in your inbox and you're looking for this girl's number that your friend texted you 3 weeks ago, simply start typing what you're looking for and it will display search results. That has to be one of my favorite features on this app.

The landscape typing mode is very neat too. Nothing revolutionary on this side but it's nice to be able to type in landscape mode. The typing mode also allows you to easily insert the contact info of one of your contacts in the text message. Let's say you want to text your friend's address to one of your friends, simply tap the "insert" button and it takes you to to your contacts. From there, choose the appropriate contact and select what info (email, phone number or address) you want to insert in the text. This is also a great feature!

I was very annoyed by this demo version though. It crashed on me once but the most annoying thing is that I couldn't read my text messages. "Oh well" I said to myself, "let's try to send a text message"... That's when the trouble started for me.

I typed my text message and tapped "send". It took a few seconds and then it gave me an error message saying that it couldn't send the text message due to some error. Mm... ok... not good! I tried again. Same thing. I exit the app and go to the native SMS app and I try to send a text message from there. That's when something I had never seen before happened. It showed that I had -1 text message (see image below). What is that supposed to mean? -1? I can understand "0 text message" but I can't figure out what "-1" means...

I wasn't able to send text messages from my native SMS app either and I started to freak out thinking that iRealSMS had messed up my iPhone. I rebooted the phone and I now had "-2 text messages" showing up on my iPhone. WTF? I was still unable to send text messages. I then decided to clear all my SMS messages hoping it would help. It did. I deleted all my SMS and doing this made the "-2 text messages" disappear and most importantly I was now able to send text messages again.

After that, I launched Cydia and uninstalled iRealSMS. I went to the company's website and realized the app was for sale for 10 Euros (about $13). If you want my opinion, it's way too expensive for taking the risk to mess up your iPhone. I am kind of disappointed because this application seemed to have great potential. All the features available in iRealSMS are great and I would use most of them on a daily basis but I do think it is too expensive and that I'd rather keep my iPhone safe. Hopefully a future update will clear this issue I had, and maybe give less limitation to what you can do with the demo version.