Should I change the silence mode for text messages or leave it as is?

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Good afternoon:

Several family members have been using Silence for years.

But it’s been years since a new version was released, and I don’t think the source code is available anymore.

Some family members have told me they’re getting scam attempts. I’ve already told them that has nothing to do with Silence. But they’re asking if there’s a more up-to-date and reliable version. And one that doesn’t have unnecessary permissions, since they don’t need access to the camera, NFC, or other features…

We’ve already looked at the ones available on F-Droid, but we haven’t decided on one yet.

Best regards

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Yes, spam is not an app issue but a network issue, SMS.

There’s no Silence update, and most would recommend you to switch to XMPP (Conversations, Quicksy) or Matrix (Element, Schildi) etc for your communication and just ignore SMS spam, or treat messages as spam 99% of the time.

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Yeah. it’s a pity that silence is not supported anymore.

If you want SMS (not encrypted) I would recommend QKSMS. For encrypted chat with low barrier (suitable for end users) I would go to Signal or/and Threema.

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Good afternoon:

Thank you both very much. The only thing is to install the latest unstable version of Silence. Since you have the stable version; but of course, it might not run as smoothly, or maybe it will…

I’ve told them this countless times. It’s a lottery whether you get the text messages or not. Or whether your number is on some list. But of course they tell me it’s been many years since the last update, even though I point out that their LineageOS and Android versions haven’t been updated either.

I’ve been told:

But I think that even if they change…

A hug

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One known issue of Silence, on Android 15+, is that notifications might not me shown.

I’ve tried to fix it but…yeah…I’m no dev

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I would not move to an unstable Silence build just for SMS scams. The scam part is mostly the phone number/carrier side, so a different SMS app will not really solve that. If they only need normal SMS, I would pick a maintained simple app like QUIK SMS and deny optional permissions; keep Silence only if they still use its encrypted chats with someone. The older Android/LineageOS version is probably the bigger security concern than the SMS client itself.