Once it's your app, "I wish it could…" stops being a complaint and turns into a to-do item.

Version 0.3, the same night

Version 0.2 went live at 6:27 PM on September 23. Version 0.3 went live at 7:38 PM. That hour was mostly testing, because the features had been built that afternoon alongside everything else. Here’s what I got.

A sound for every person. Each contact can have its own notification sound and vibration. Under the hood, the app makes a separate Android notification channel for each person, since that’s the only way Android lets an app give different alerts different sounds. Now I know who’s texting before I look.

Priorities and VIPs. Every contact is Standard, Priority or Silent, and anyone can be a VIP. VIPs sit at the top of my People list and always count as priority.

Reminders that don’t quit. If a priority text sits unread, the app reminds me again, on a schedule I set per person (every 10 minutes, up to twice, for example). Reading it or replying cancels the reminders. They survive the phone rebooting, too.

Quiet hours and snooze, so all of the above leaves me alone at night unless it really matters.

A setup checklist. Android has a handful of settings that silently wreck alerts: battery optimization, exact alarms, Do Not Disturb access. The settings screen checks each one and gives you a Fix button that jumps straight to the right system page.

The upgrade trick

Here’s a small detail I love. The first rebuilt app had been installed under a test package name. Instead of switching to a “proper” name and making me log in again and redo every contact’s sound, the real release kept that package name and signing key. Android treated each new version as an update, so my login and all my per-contact sounds carried over every time. Not pretty, but it worked every time.

Goodbye to the old app

For about a day I had two apps on my phone with the same name: the old React Native one and the new one. Same name, different insides. I asked Leo to get rid of the old one, and it came off both phones. Its 7-second polling stopped for good on September 24.

The desk page

Most of my day is at a PC, so on September 24 the same server got a desktop page: texts and calls in one list, call and voicemail cards right inside each conversation, keyboard shortcuts for everything, and a Ctrl+K search box for jumping to anyone. It went through 31 automated checks before going live that night.

Voicemail moves in

My office phone system already turned voicemails into emails and transcripts. On September 26 the app got a Voicemail button with a badge. Tap it to play a message, read the transcript, call back or mark it heard. There’s a second tab for “AI took a message,” which you’ll understand after the next message.

The same weekend the app learned to open on my main line by default. My server sends from more than one number, and the app had been guessing.

The full test

On September 26 we test-called every line I own and sent test texts across all of them: 22 calls and 9 texts. It found one problem I never would have guessed. One of my phones had been sitting on manual Do Not Disturb since the 22nd, so calls rang silently and showed up as missed. No app bug. Just a setting. That’s exactly why the setup checklist exists.

The fastest way to learn what you want is to use something that isn't it.

The question

My first instinct on port day was to skip apps entirely. I live in Telegram, so I asked for a bot that would let me text through it “so I don’t have to deal with a weird app.” That works for alerts. It’s miserable for actual conversations with forty different people.

So at 3:29 that afternoon:

Orion came back with a short list of open-source options. Fifteen minutes later:

Forking an open-source app

Orion found VoIPSuite-Mobile, an open-source texting app from a privacy project. It’s built in React Native, and it already knew how to talk to a VoIP carrier. Orion forked it, pointed it at my own server, and named it KCCS Text.

Within two days it was on both of my phones. By September 17 it was at version 0.7.0, with a desktop-and-mobile “business hub” growing next to it on the server. For a forked weekend project, that’s fast.

Then I actually used it all day.

Bug one: the silent alarm

The point of a texting app is knowing when a text arrives. On September 17 we found that Android had been quietly marking every single notification from the app as SILENT. The notification channels had been created with sound and vibration off, and once Android creates a channel, the app can’t simply change it later.

The fix was new channels with new IDs, plus a lesson I’d keep relearning for the rest of this project: on Android, notification settings are sticky. If you get them wrong on the first install, you have to version your way out.

Bug two: the text eater

The one that drove me nuts showed up the next day:

Here’s what was going on. The app checked the server for new messages every 10 seconds, and each check redrew the screen, including the box I was typing in. Phone keyboards keep a little “work in progress” state while you type (the word being autocorrected, the swipe in flight). Redraw the box under it and the keyboard loses its place. Letters vanish. Sometimes a whole sentence.

Orion’s answer was a redesign, version 0.6.1. When Leo reviewed it, it caught a trap: the “new” version had the same internal version number as the 0.7.0 already installed, and it was missing picture messages and saved drafts. Installed over the top, it would have been a downgrade wearing a new coat of paint.

The audit

That night I told Leo what I really wanted. Roughly: make this the ultimate texting app for my number, not a half-baked thing I can kind of put up with.

Leo’s audit was blunt:

• The whole app was one giant file on a React Native version from 2022.
• There were three copies of the code drifting apart in different folders.
• The 10-second polling was the root of the typing bug, the battery drain and the slow delivery.
• Patching it would mean fighting an old framework forever.

The recommendation: freeze the old app, stop polling, and rebuild around a server that pushes new messages the instant they arrive. That’s message 05.