I love KDE. Have used it for over 30 years. But I must admit I’m not at all impressed with KDE Connect SMS. I have an Android phone. About a year ago I started using KDE Connect SMS to send and reply to SMS messages on my phone as I suck at trying to write replies on those small phone keyboards and I’m at my computer most of the day anyway so this seemed like a perfect solution. And for the most part it has been great when it actually works.
First issue is when the KDE app was installed on the phone. The phone and KDE desktop program would loose connection soon after the phone’s screen powered off. Waking the phone restored connection briefly. After a lot of digging through articles and what fixed it. Dig into the app settings and set it to not be allowed to be put into sleep mode. This fixed the problem but should be somewhere in the documentation on how to set it up. Or is there even a way to get the phone app to ask for those permissions when installed?
Second issue is that if I go out somewhere and my phone looses connection from my local network then later re-joins… Most of the time you need to exit the SMS program on the computer and restart it. But after restarting it on the computer you also have to wake the phone to establish the connection then it’s fine. Is there no way for the software to be smart enough to just automatically reconnect?
Third issue is that for some reason KDE Connect SMS seems to just randomly crap out and stop sending the messages to the phone. Restarting the program on the computer works for a while. Sometimes it takes days for this to happen or sometimes maybe an hour. You type a reply, hit enter and it just vanishes and never makes it to the phone even though the previous messages you just typed actually went through. It’s like the program attempts to send it, can’t then just gives up but also doesn’t give an error that it couldn’t send nor gives any option to re-try. Only way I notice is after a few seconds or so delay my reply doesn’t show in the message history.
Last issue is pairing. I had an issue after an udate with Connect where it couldn’t pair. Tried and tried no luck. Main problem was on the desktop software. Resorted to trying to delete the paired device and pair it again. For some reason the desktop KDE software refused to remove the paired device. Finally had to uninstall the program, remove it’s config files and re-install it before it would allow me to pair again with the phone. After that it was able to once again pair with the phone and work.
Are these normal bugs still waiting/needing to be fixed or…?
Thanks.