How to read SMS stored in SIM card in Android

Question

I was wondering if anyone knew anything about programmatically getting the SMS messages off of your phone's sim card on an android platform.

I would like to write a program that allows you to save either individual messages or entire threads to the SD card, but after looking around for a bit, I have discovered that google decided to take out that api from the current android SDK.

I saw in a few places that there are hidden APIs for this, but no one knew what they were or how to use them.

Answer 1

You can manage the SMS saved on the SIM card with the URI content://sms/icc . It works also with the last version of Android.

For example this prints the contents of the cursor to System.out :

Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(Uri.parse("content://sms/icc"), null, null, null, null);
DatabaseUtils.dumpCursor(cursor);

You need the permissions:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_SMS"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_SMS"/>

You can find a complete example here: https://github.com/android/platform_packages_apps_mms/blob/master/src/com/android/mms/ui/ManageSimMessages.java