Questions, answered

Yes, it reads them (that is the point), but it does so entirely on your phone. The analysis is rule-based and the rules ship inside the app. There is no API call, no cloud inference and no server that receives your conversations. We do run one. It holds what paying people requires: a verified number, a balance, which polls were answered. It has never held a message.

The practical consequence: scam flagging, extraction and search still work in airplane mode, and nobody at Textly can read a message even if they were asked to.

Useful, not infallible. An extracted date or amount can be misread.

Every generated item links back to the message it came from, and anything with a consequence deserves that click. We would rather say this here than let you discover it with a missed appointment.

WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Slack on both platforms, plus SMS and MMS natively on Android. Every connection is optional. On Android, Textly works perfectly well as a pure SMS app if that is all you want.

Setup for each one is described on Connecting channels.

Textly links to your existing WhatsApp account as a companion device, the same mechanism WhatsApp Web and WhatsApp Desktop use. You scan a code from your phone once; your chats then appear in your unified inbox and you can reply from there.

Your WhatsApp account stays exactly where it is. Textly does not replace it, and the WhatsApp app keeps working alongside it. Unlinking Textly in WhatsApp’s Linked devices screen ends the connection immediately.

[REVIEW BEFORE LAUNCH: WhatsApp’s terms restrict third-party clients. Confirm your integration path, and state any risk to the user’s WhatsApp account here plainly.]

Neither is supported, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. iMessage has no client interface outside Apple’s own devices, and Signal’s design deliberately prevents third-party access, which is precisely the point of Signal.

This applies on Android only. Android allows one app at a time to receive and manage SMS, and without that role Textly cannot show your texts, receive new ones or send messages.

You can switch back to your previous app at any time in Android settings. Your SMS live in Android’s message storage rather than inside Textly, so nothing is lost either way.

Yes. Slack workspace administrators can see which third-party apps are authorised, and many workspaces restrict them entirely. If yours does, the connection will simply fail. This is Slack’s policy, not something Textly can or should work around.

Textly never uploads them, and there is no Textly server for them to go to. Everything the app itself does (storage, search, scam detection, extraction) happens locally.

To be precise about the part that isn’t ours: connecting WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord or Slack means Textly talks to their servers to fetch and send your messages, exactly as their own apps do. That data already lives on those services; Textly changes where you read it, not who hosts it. SMS likewise travels over your carrier’s network.

On your device, yes: the local message database and all channel credentials are protected by the platform’s hardware-backed key storage, the Android Keystore.

In transit it depends on the protocol. WhatsApp messages remain end-to-end encrypted and are decrypted only on your linked device. Telegram, Discord and Slack are encrypted to their servers but readable by those services. SMS is a carrier protocol with no end-to-end encryption at all. No app can change that, and any app claiming it can is misleading you.

Textly checks a message against a fixed list of signals: whether the link domain matches the brand it names, whether the sender uses a shortener, whether a payment is demanded under time pressure. Each signal carries a weight, and past a threshold the thread is marked as spam. There is no model and nothing learns, which is why the same message always gets the same answer.

Nothing is uploaded for classification, and you can always overrule the verdict. Textly remembers your correction locally. It is a safety net, not a guarantee. Never enter payment details from a link in a message.

No. There is no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting SDK, no advertising identifier and no telemetry in the app. The only numbers we ever see are the aggregate install counts Google Play shows every developer.

Free, with no ads, no paid tier and no data sold. Because the sorting runs on your device rather than on servers we rent, Textly has no per-message cost to pass on, which is precisely what makes giving it away sustainable.

Android today, on 7.0 and newer. There is no hardware requirement beyond that.

The iPhone version is in preparation and there is nothing to install yet. We would rather say that than let you find out after tapping a button.

One thing, and it is a significant one: SMS and MMS will not be available on iOS. Apple provides no interface for a third-party app to read or send text messages, and no way to become your default messaging app. Your texts stay in Apple’s Messages app.

Everything else is planned to work as it does on Android. WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Slack unify the same way, and the on-device intelligence (search, scam detection, extraction) is the same.

We would rather state this plainly now than have you discover it after installing.

It goes away with the app, because the device is the only place it ever was. On Android, your SMS stay in the system message storage and will be available to your next default SMS app. Your WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord and Slack history stays on those services, untouched.

On Android, your SMS move with the system backup as they always have. Connected channels are re-linked on the new device, and each service’s history comes back down from that service. Because nothing of yours sits on our infrastructure, there is nothing for us to migrate.