Deleting SMS Programmatically

(using SDK v1 R2)

It's not perfect, since i need to delete the entire conversation, but for our purposes, it's a sufficient compromise as we will at least know all messages will be looked at and verified. Our flow will probably need to then listen for the message, capture for the message we want, do a query to get the thread_id of the recently inbounded message and do the delete() call.

In our Activity:

Uri uriSms = Uri.parse("content://sms/inbox");
Cursor c = getContentResolver().query(uriSms, null,null,null,null); 
int id = c.getInt(0);
int thread_id = c.getInt(1); //get the thread_id
getContentResolver().delete(Uri.parse("content://sms/conversations/" + thread_id),null,null);

Note: I wasn't able to do a delete on  content://sms/inbox/ or  content://sms/all/

Looks like the thread takes precedence, which makes sense, but the error message only emboldened me to be angrier. When trying the delete on sms/inbox/ or sms/all/, you will probably get:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unknown URL
    at com.android.providers.telephony.SmsProvider.delete(SmsProvider.java:510)
    at android.content.ContentProvider$Transport.delete(ContentProvider.java:149)
    at android.content.ContentProviderNative.onTransact(ContentProviderNative.java:149)

For additional reference too, make sure to put this into your manifest for your intent receiver:

<receiver android:name=".intent.MySmsReceiver">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.provider.Telephony.SMS_RECEIVED"></action>
    </intent-filter>
</receiver>

Note the receiver tag does not look like this:

When I had those settings, android gave me some crazy permissions exceptions that didn't allow android.phone to hand off the received SMS to my intent. So, DO NOT put that RECEIVE_SMS permission attribute in your intent! Hopefully someone wiser than me can tell me why that was the case.

Timing issues

For the initial scope of RapidAndroid?, we foresaw that the app would need to offload the SMS storage burden off the builtin SMS database on the phone to our storage database (right now on the SD card).

The issue with the above code is that the timing in which you can do an SMS delete is a bit tricky. The intent Receiver that your app is listening for the SMS_RECEIVE may be receiving an in-memory message object that may not have been written to the SMS database. The message actually might not be written to the phone sms inbox until after your Receiver has finished.