A patch release with one fix for picture messages that fail to download, and the diagnostics to work out why when they still do.
Fixed
- Picture messages could fail to download on some phones. Clear SMS asks Android to save an incoming picture message into a file of its own, and when granting permission to write there it named two system components by hand. On a phone whose messaging service lives somewhere else the write was refused and the download failed — and a Pixel is one of those phones: a diagnostic log from a Pixel 7 Pro showed seven components needing that permission, including
com.shannon.rcsservice, where the old code granted to two. Sending has resolved this correctly since 0.22.0; downloading now does the same, through one shared piece of code so the two cannot drift apart again. (#135, thanks @snappyapple632) - A failed download now records why. Until now it logged only Android's bare error number. It now also records whether that permission was granted and to which components, whether the phone was on mobile data or WiFi, and which SIM was used. Only system component names are recorded — never message text, numbers or addresses.
If your picture messages still will not download
This fix does not cure every stuck download, and the report that prompted it turned out to be a different fault: that phone's log showed the download reaching Verizon's server and being answered HTTP 404, which is the carrier saying the content is no longer there — not a problem with permissions at all. One known cause of that is another messaging app retrieving the message first, since the carrier deletes it once it has been collected.
So if you are still affected, Settings → About → Share diagnostic logs is now worth sending. It will say which of these is happening, where before it could not. The report contains no message text, phone numbers, names or codes, you preview the exact contents first, and you choose whether sender IDs are masked.
Also
Code-style checking was restored in the build. It had silently stopped inspecting the app's sources during the Android Gradle Plugin 9 upgrade — still running, still reporting success, checking nothing — which went unnoticed across two releases. The build now fails outright if that ever happens again, rather than passing quietly. No behaviour changed; 52 files were reformatted.
No new permissions, and still no INTERNET permission. All five translations (German, Spanish, Hindi, Polish, Russian) remain complete.