New SMS client for KDE Connect (feedback welcome)

[Steve Benz]

Thanks for giving it a try and sorry it didn't go well.  I had a VM up a 
few months ago which could compile all of kde connect, but it was 
painful to work in the VM, so I abandoned it to go back to developing on 
my Mint desktop.  I'll see if I can get it up again.  What distro would 
you suggest for this?  Skynet thinks OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

The symptoms you're describing make me think that it somehow couldn't 
run requestAllConversationThreads but was able to process signals.  If 
you could supply me the console output, I'd know more.

I'm returning to Linux&C++ after many years in the JavaScript and dotnet 
world, and I'm still struggling to navigate the world of distros and 
patches.  The KPeople thing was me just trying to get something/anything 
to work; I figured once I could get it into a testable state I could get 
some help figuring out the right path or perhaps updates would make a 
simple path obvious.

You mention that waking the phone through the API was not possible.  
I've seen that on other sources as well.  But...  The Windows Phone Link 
app seems to be able to do just that. Although, maddeningly, the thing 
doesn't do it automatically.  You open the app, it gleefully tells you 
that the phone's not connected and gives you a button to press. You 
press the button, spinnies spin for a few seconds, and your 
conversations update.  I don't know how it does that, but that's what 
happens.

As to the tray icon, Qt Creator created my initial version with a 
QGuiApplication and I figured that was a well-reasoned choice and stuck 
with it.  But apparently, it's not really all that great a choice and 
you can just switch it to a QApplication (and add a #include 
<QApplication>) and that seems to just work.  From what I understand, 
the QSystemTrayIcon will, on some desktops, fall back to using a QWidget 
if it can't use a "SNI backend". Whatever that is.

Anyway, I'll see about getting that VM up and reproduce the problems you 
describe.


On 8/10/26 6:41 PM, Simon Redman wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm. I gave this app a try. It 
> took a few patches to get it launched: The contact loader is targeting 
> KF5 KPeople, and the main app calls qFatal if the KF5 loader can't 
> execute, effectively requiring both KF5 for this app and KF6 for the 
> KDE Connect daemon.  It tries to construct a tray icon with a 
> QGuiApplication, which crashes due to not being able to create a 
> QWidget without QApplication (at least on Plasma desktop). After 
> launching, I just had a box with a red ! in the top left. Once I used 
> the main SMS app to download a conversation, that conversation showed 
> in the new app, so potentially it is not compatible with the latest 
> version of the daemon.
>
> Since you discuss the plugin API in the README, I'd be happy to help 
> guide improvements there. Search, for example, would be cool to have. 
> I'd recommend you start by writing down the API you envision and 
> discussing it here or on Matrix. Some of the things you have 
> highlighted in the new SMS README are not possible, so I don't know 
> what else you might be thinking and I wouldn't want you to start down 
> a path which is known to be blocked. For example, Android does not 
> expose an API to wake the phone. As a side-note, I would advise that 
> the Android SMS-fetching APIs are quite poorly documented and several 
> are vendor-specific. I'd recommend not touching those, however I'd be 
> open to a better way of presenting the data.
>
> In general, I would encourage people to contribute to the main app if 
> they find it is not sufficient. I am not protective of the current 
> version, I would be excited if someone with UI expertise rebuilt it. 
> Recently a community member re-worked message loading, and now 
> navigation/scrolling on the official app is drastically improved.
>
> Thanks,
> Simon
>
> On 8/9/26 18:18, Steve Benz wrote:
>>
>> I’ve been working on a new SMS client that integrates with KDE 
>> Connect, with the goal of addressing some long‑standing usability and 
>> reliability issues in the existing SMS app. It's at a point now where 
>> it's ready for more people to try it out. I hope you'll find that you 
>> much prefer it over the existing sms app.
>>
>> The code is here: https://github.com/NermNermNerm/smsapp.git
>>
>> And I’ve made a prebuilt release: 
>> https://github.com/NermNermNerm/smsapp/releases/tag/v0.0
>>
>> I’m looking for feedback from people familiar with KDE Connect’s SMS 
>> plugin. The biggest limitation right now is reliability — I’ve added 
>> defensive logic to work around some of the plugin’s quirks, but there 
>> are structural issues that can’t be solved on the client side alone. 
>> I wouldn't want to put this thing out into the world without 
>> addressing that.
>>
>> Before I go further, I’d like to hear what the community thinks: 
>> whether this direction makes sense, whether there’s interest in 
>> improving the SMS plugin itself, and whether this could eventually be 
>> something worth upstreaming.
>>
>> If you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate you giving it a try 
>> and sharing your thoughts.
>>
>
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