Heart SMS is a fork of Pulse SMS, an app which was bought out by Maple Media.
The goal of this project is to create an SMS/MMS app that has full support for all of the features that users love, is based on material design, and supports a strong end-to-end encryption version of a tablet/desktop messenger that sends messages through your personal phone number.
Many other Heart platforms are also open source (including the backend). If you would like to take a look at them, you can find them here.
This repo is almost ready to go, right out of the box. There are just two properties files that
you need to create for the build process to succeed: api_keys.properties and keystore.properties.
Both files can simply be copy and paste from the examples, if you choose.
You'll need to set up a few different API keys. Rename the api_keys.properties.example
file to api_keys.properties. This alone will get the build working and might be perfectly fine
for your usage.
If you are using a self-built version of the app on a daily basis, then you might want to put in a few of your own API keys, rather than the public ones here as they belong to Pulse/Klinker/Maple. These will be changed soon. Please see the notes at the top of the file to learn more.
Whether you are going to make a release build of the app or not, you will need to copy the
keystore.properties.example file to keystore.properties. If you aren't going to make a release
build for anything, just leave it as is.
If you are going to make a release build, you will need to add your keystore to the repo and fill in fields outlined by that file.
Once you have the above properties in place, Heart has an entirely typical build. Run:
# generate APK files
$ ./gradlew assembleDebug
$ ./gradlew assembleRelease
# generate AAB files
$ ./gradlew bundleDebug
$ ./gradlew bundleRelease
Heart contains unit and database integration tests. To run all of them, run:
$ ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest
Heart uses Robolectric for Android related tests. It does not contain UI-espresso tests.
Contributions are welcome!
- If you just want to report a bug or file a feature request, please open an issue.
- Any other contributions can just go through the Pull Requests on this repo.
If you are looking to make a large change, it is probably best to discuss it with me first. Open up an issue, letting me know that this is something that you would like to make a PR for, and I can tell you what I think.
Allowing unlimited customization and endless settings pages is not necessarily Heart's goal. While some may disagree, ultimately this does not add up to the best user experience. More settings means a much higher overhead for new users, as well as a more difficult time for existing users. Luke did his best to enforce this vision by provide logical defaults, throughout the app. While Heart is not light on customization, there is a balance between what could be considered "too much".
This vision is somewhat different in the eyes of an open source project, however. A major benefit of open source software is that you can customize it however you want. With that in mind, even if a feature you are suggesting is not something that I want to officially support in the app, that does not mean it can't and shouldn't be included! If you find use out of it, chances are someone else will, as well.
Within Heart, there is an "Open Source Experiments" settings page. There are disclaimers at the top that these preferences come as contributions from the community, without official support. This would be a great place to put any "tweak" options that you wish to include.
The original Pulse app was created by Luke Klinker and was licensed under Apache 2.0. The copyright
statement below is retained even though Luke has sold Pulse and is not involved with Heart:
Copyright (C) 2020 Luke Klinker
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.