RCS Messages (especially from iPhone) while using Google Messages not being backed up or quirky?

[SephYuyX]

Expected behaviour

SMS/MMS backed up to GMail as an individual email with the sender's name.

Actual behaviour

iPhone or RCS aren't being backed up, or at least consistently, and group convos all come in as a single name.

Reproduce by

No response

Android version

14 (2023)

Phone brand

Samsung

Phone model number

S24

SMS Backup+ version

v1.6β

Messaging app

Google Messages

Other details

Outside of the obvious state of the app currently, it still seems to be kind of mostly working? I recently switched from an S20 to an S24, and brought the app over using Samsung Smart Switch. In addition, I was using Samsung Messages on the S20, but the S24 "forced" me over to Google Messages and to use RCS. I used Smart Switch to bring all of my texts (going back to 2014) over to S24 Samsung Messages, and then changed the default over to Google Messages where everything was successfully brought in. After logging back into SMS Backup+, and running a backup, it successfully backed up just the new messages.

My main use with this app is its SMS/MMS/Calls to email. Love this feature.

Moving forward, I have a contact that is an iPhone user, and I have noticed that the messages that person sends is not being backed up to individual emails, where all my messages sent to them are successful. Why?

Also, I have now noticed that a large group I am in, while all messages and things are being backed up to individual emails, they are all appearing to be coming from one specific contact. Why?

[kurahaupo]

Thanks for the report.

What you're probably seeing is just misattribution. The app wrongly assumes that the "sender" is the first participant listed, when it should scan all the participants to find the one marked as "sender"; a patch to that effect has been submitted but it hasn't been merged yet.

Group messages are a conundrum; unlike email, there's no original message ID, and no "in-reply-to" message ID, so they have to be faked. It's not really clear how that should be done to make group messages behave as users expect.

And of course, @jberkel has disappeared so we're a bit limited for building and distributing updates.

[SephYuyX]

Definitely probably the case. I just wonder if anyone else using Google Messages with RCS enabled are having a similar issue with their group convos?

I'm not bugged by that one as much as I am with 1-on-1 individual texts with a known iPhone users. My texts get backed up fine, but theirs don't at all. I know of two people I text with that have iPhones and are showing this issue.

I should have opened up a second bug report for it.. but uh, as you say, not really anything you or anyone else can do with the app nowadays so why bother lol. Unfortunately.. I guess it's time to move on and go throw the misery of trying to find another app that fills the email void.

Thank you for your effort.

[c0fe]

@kurahaupo what is the issue with forking and building the updates that way? Is the building of the program highly convoluted due to the dependencies or what?

[kurahaupo]

@c0fe the problem is personal: I have zero experience what's needed to get code from this git repo into my phone. As best I can see there are 4 things I need, with little to no idea on how to do any of them:

1. compile the existing code on my machine to create an APK;
2. create a workflow on GitHub to do the same;
3. upload and install an APK into my phone;
4. make an APK available on Google Play and other markets.

I'm not even certain that's the whole list; it's a huge blind spot for me.

There are documents that cover some aspects, such as "creating a new workflow on GitHub", but a guide that simply enumerates steps, without explaining their purpose and connection, is not nearly as useful as it sounds; worse if it assumes a blank slate for a brand new project.

If anyone can point to a comprehensive document that ties all of these together, from the vantage point of someone taking over an existing project rather than starting a new one, that would much appreciated.

I have four decades' experience writing and maintaining software in upwards of two dozen languages, so I'm finding this exceedingly frustrating, to the point where I simply avoid it.

[turekv]

There definitely is something wrong with how the app handles RCS messages. I can see here on Github a lot of issues mentioning a wrong sender or recipient being set while backing up the SMS/MMS messages. I only experience such wrong attribution if the respective message is an RCS one. Plain old SMS messages sent to phones not supporting RCS are backed up just fine.

[kurahaupo]

@turekv actual SMS messages (rather than MMS or RCS) are immune to the misattribution because they are always two-party; only the "other party" is recorded for both sending and receiving, but that matches how people naturally want them grouped.

MMS and RCS, on the other hand, create "groups", where you yourself are always a member, and the order of the members of the group is indeterminate. Sometimes another party replying to a group will put the members in a different order than the original sender.

As originally written, SMS Backup+ assumed that the first member was always the "sender", and the other members were fixed, because that's how the MMS handling worked in all test devices that @jberkel had at the time.

There has since been a patch submitted that fixes this, but nobody is updating Google Play so you'll need to compile for yourself or ask around to see if anyone else has a build they can send you.

[turekv]

@kurahaupo Thank you for the clarification.

[c0fe]

@kurahaupo is there documentation on how to build this?

[kurahaupo]

@c0fe I'm looking for the same thing. If I figure it out I'll let you know.

[sshaikh]

The fork at https://github.com/henrichg/sms-backup-plus seems to have been updated enough to build with the latest version of Android Studio. I'm not sure who is able to do so here but they could pull those changes back?