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SMS

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Andy Holmes edited this page Sep 11, 2017 · 6 revisions

SMS Application Window

Sending SMS messages straight from your desktop is a desirable feature for most people. Unfortunately, the SMS features of the KDE Connect protocol are still rather limited, but the SMS Application does its best to smooth the rough edges and integrate into Gnome Shell. See the technical details section for more information on how this is achieved and some of the limitations.

Contacts Auto-Complete

SMS Application Window showing Contacts Auto-Completion

Contacts integration and auto-completion is offered as an optional feature that supports either Folks and/or Gnome Online Accounts and requires:

  • Any account in a service supported by Folks (eg. Gnome Online Accounts, Evolution)
  • Folks GIR
    • Fedora: folks
    • Ubuntu: gir1.2-folks-0.6
  • GLib Development files
    • Fedora: glib2-devel
    • Ubuntu: glib2.0-dev

OR

  • A Google account authenticated in Gnome Online Accounts
  • Gnome Online Accounts GIR
    • Fedora: gnome-online-accounts
    • Ubuntu: gir1.2-goa-1.0
  • GData GIR
    • Fedora: libgdata
    • Ubuntu: gir1.2-gdata-0.0

Please note, this feature is difficult to test for all possible account types. If you encounter problems or accounts that seem unsupported, please follow the instructions in the Debugging page of the Wiki and open a new issue.

Two-Way Conversations

SMS Application Window showing Two-Way Conversation

Two-Way conversations are a simulated feature of the SMS Application and are not guaranteed to work. You must have both the Telephony integration and Receive notifications plugins enabled for this feature to work. See the technical details section for more information.

Technical Details

sendSms(String phoneNumber, String messageBody)

That's all, folks! SMS is a highly desired feature in this extension and KDE Connect in general, however, as you can see, the only content you can currently send is text.

It is also not possible in Gnome Shell to reply to incoming messages via the notification, like it is in KDE. According to the source code KDE Connect should pass incoming messages to the telepathy framework, but although Gnome Shell has a built in telepathy client, this doesn't seem to be compatible.

In fact, the only way to distinguish the difference between regular notifications and SMS notifications is by reading the internalId property and searching for an instance of sms. From here it is possible read the ticker property which could appear one of two ways:

Contact Name - The incoming message content

In this case, even if you have integrated contacts which contain an exact match for Contact Name, if the contact has more than one number (eg. home/mobile/work) there is no way to know which number should be replied to.

555-555-5555 - The incoming message content

In this case, it may be possible to intercept the notification, however this is not implemented since most texts you receive will likely be from known contacts.

In the SMS application, however, this method is used to simulate two-way conversation by comparing incoming notifications to contacts and phone numbers in the Contact Entry, since they are known (or at least assumed) to be valid SMS capable recipients.

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