Texter — A Better SMS App for Android
Samsung Messages is the daily driver for millions of Android users. I’m one of them, and I’ve spent years wishing it were a little different in a few specific ways. So I started building a replacement.
The project is called Texter, and it’s the first app under a new brand of mine called Zagar Innovations — the name I’m using for any original software I release. The pitch is simple: a fast, beautiful, Material You-themed SMS and MMS app for Android that you actually own. No telemetry, no ads, no walled garden. Just texting, done right.
v1 is a clean SMS and MMS replacement that mirrors the things Samsung Messages does well and adds the things it doesn’t. The list: per-chat wallpapers (which I’ve always wanted), per-contact notification sounds and vibration patterns, pinned conversations, scheduled messages, quick responses, conversation categories, blocking by phone number AND by phrase, per-conversation shared media galleries, in-conversation search, VIP / priority senders that bypass Do Not Disturb, voice messages, and full-text search across every message in your inbox. All of it themed in modern Material You with dynamic color, dark mode, and accessibility built in.
The interesting part is what’s coming in v2. Most messaging apps that want to do “richer than SMS” features (typing indicators, read receipts, high-resolution media, emoji reactions) lean on Google’s Jibe RCS implementation, which is locked to specific carriers and basically impossible to integrate with as a third-party app. Instead, I’m going to build my own backend — a small server that lights up these features automatically whenever both people in a conversation have Texter installed. Think iMessage’s blue-bubble effect, but on Android, and on a backend I run myself. When the recipient doesn’t have Texter, it falls back to plain SMS like nothing happened.
Tech-wise it’s native Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, Room with SQLCipher for the database, FTS4 for full-text search, Hilt for dependency injection, and minSdk 34 (Android 14). No cross-platform compromises. For the tricky MMS pieces in v1 I’m leaning on the klinker library to keep the foundation stable, then v2 will replace it with my own MMS layer once I’ve spent the time to learn the wire protocol properly.
Progress so far
- ✅ Brainstormed scope, locked v1 features, picked the tech stack
- ✅ Design spec written
- ✅ Phase 1: Foundation — Gradle scaffold, Hilt + Compose + Material 3, theme system with Material You + brand fallback, navigation graph, placeholder conversation list, GitHub Actions CI. Code reviewed and approved.
- ✅ Phase 2: Data layer — Room database with all entities, SQLCipher encryption, Android Keystore key management, FTS4 full-text search, DataStore preferences, repository pattern, Hilt providers, integration tests. 374 tests passing.
- 🟡 Phase 3 next: SMS app contract, default-app handover, onboarding flow, bulk import from system Telephony
What’s next
Phase 3 turns Texter into a real default messages app. Once that lands, Phase 4 wires up the actual send and receive flows for SMS and MMS. Phases 5 and 6 layer in the personalization and productivity features (per-chat wallpapers, scheduled messages, quick responses, voice messages, etc.) and Phase 7 ships local backup and restore. Phase 8 is hardening and Play Store submission.
v1 ships when all eight phases land. After that, v2 starts — the Texter Protocol backend that lights up the typing/read-receipts/hi-res-media/reactions story over my own server. v3 is polish: stickers, cloud backup, bubble composer, smart reply, location sharing, dual-SIM polish.
The eventual goal is the Texter brand sitting alongside future Zagar Innovations apps under one website that I’ll build out separately. I have a name and a domain. The website gets its own project later this year.