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up vote 4 down vote favorite

All I've been seeing about these apps are the positives. I want to know the negatives of using them, apart from me having to install an additional app to do something that the phone can already do by default. I'm looking to using one of the two because of the built in support for backing up SMS and MMS, something that will come in very handy especially since I text often.

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for what it's worth, there are apps to backup text messages, without relying on a third-party messaging app. That being said, there are still advantages to third-party messaging apps. – Chance Sep 18 '12 at 16:20

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I can only comment on GoSMS which, while being a great app, has a few obvious issues.

  • Texting via GoChat is, at best, unreliable. With both parties connected to hi-speed broadband, texts take their own sweet time to deliver. These texts shouldn't expire but they do. Given a certain amount of time, texts stay undelivered.
  • If you have root access and are thinking of uninstalling the stock SMS app (which would be the logical thing to do), bear in mind that GoSMS notifications don't work hand in hand with the app's UI. Meaning, if you see a notification in the status bar and press on it, it will lead you to the main app interface but you may or may not see the actual message. This happens often when you receive more than one or two texts at the same time. Strangely, even though you can't read the texts (I assumed they were lost), you will have an irritating notification indicating that you have unread texts (that you obviously can't read because they don't show up). Having the stock app ensures that GoSMS shows all texts, unread or otherwise. Also, when you have read the text in the stock app, the notification from GoSMS disappears.
  • Local backup only works when you aren't connected, either via Wi-fi or mobile data. With the latest version of the app, everything gets backed up to GoCloud. This happens only if you have signed up with GoChat.

Hope this helps.

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up vote 1 down vote

Although no one writes about this, the downsize of installing one of those apps is the fact of consuming more resources than the built in app.

Cons:

  • More disk space used
  • More RAM used

But the increase is so irrelevant that it doesn't even count as a downsize by most reviewers.

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1  
it's more important on very old devices with 256 MB internal space; most newer devices ships with gigabytes for internal spaces and so the couple extra megabytes needed for installing third party SMS apps are not worth talking about. The only reason for installing third party SMS/Phone/Launcher/Keyboard/Browser/Mail apps are purely a matter of free choices and preferences; some apps implemented things in different ways which some people liked better compared to the stock versions which others just can't stand. – Lie Ryan Sep 18 '12 at 17:34
up vote 0 down vote

You will have to experiment with the apps to see if they play nice with your keyboard and spell-check behavior. I don't know if this is still the case, but previously, when I used Go SMS Pro, I didn't have desirable spell-correct behavior with my keyboard (which was, ironically, Go Keyboard). My keyboard would display corrections if I went back to a word I already typed in applications such as Gmail, Facebook, etc... But this was NOT the case inside the Go SMS app.

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