Disclaimer: This is a fan project, and not affiliated with or endorsed by TextNow.
TextNowPlus is a fork of VoicePlus.
VoicePlus is a system-level app that allows any standard Android SMS messaging app to be used for sending and receiving Google Voice texts.
TextNowPlus aspires to build on the features of Voiceplus, but using the services of another company, TextNow. My original goal was to allow the use of TextSecure (a wonderful secure messaging tool) with my TextNow phone service, which is otherwise sandboxed into it's own messaging app.
In the longer term, I hope to add:
This app is a system app,and needs to be built as part of Cyanogenmod's
build process, in place of the VoicePlus repo. There are no pre-compiled
APK's for now, and I won't have instructions here for awhile. Also, it
can't coexist with VoicePlus at the moment. And also, credentials need
to be manually sniffed on the wire via mitmproxy, and the username
and client_id manually entered into the settings XML file. Yeah, this
isn't user friendly yet. Just wanted to get some feedback on the ideas.
TextNow is a commercial company offering an app that provides voice and SMS/MMS service over data, reachable via regular phone numbers. They have started a small mobile carrier that will offer data-only phone plans using their app. On the backend, their free SMS service is powered by an unofficial API, and their per-minute voice service is powered by standard SIP.
I'd like to help make it possible for people to easily communicate using the cheap and plentiful wifi in many urban areas.
Perhaps more importantly, I'd like to see more people prioritizing data channels for communication, as a means to improve our overall privacy options. For that statement to make sense, it's important to understand that the regular phone network is inherently broken. Its security was cracked by grad students in the 90s and never fixed. The only security that we can hope for is security that only becomes available over data, through end-to-end encryption. And when we can rely on data-only for both secure and insecure communication, then it becomes trivial to opportunistically upgrade to encrypted channels when our tools detect that both parties are capable.
So why not just use regular phone providers with standard data plans offered separately. You see, when we choose to rely more on data channels, both encrypted and unencrypted communications are going through similar bottlenecks. This might sound bad, but this is a good situation to find ourselves in! The shared problem aligns incentives toward making both insecure and secure communications better. As it stands, communication is mentally "tiered" in most peoples' minds: reliable cell communications, and unreliable data communications. But on the backend, it's all data. Phone company's just prioritize and shape regular cell communications (text & voice), while remaining laisez-faire with all the other data traffic lumped together.
But when using data for all communications, solving reliability issues for insecure calls (to "regular" numbers) also helps solve reliability issues for secure calls. And now, a provider like TextNow who has become a carrier, becomes interesting. Though not selling security, they are still selling hardware and data-only service with expectations of reliability. And so their goals become aligned with those seeking better privacy solutions, even if TextNow is not working on those solutions themselves.