text-me

The 2% or less of smartphone users with Windows Phones should be aware that Windows 10 Mobile reached end of life on December 10, 2019. For those who want to transfer their texts to their new devices, I hope you find this software useful.

This software has been designed with extensibility in mind. In the future, I may add support for more mobile platforms.

Prerequisites

The supported data formats are tied to specific applications. So "converting to Android" really means "converting to a format used by a specific, unofficial Android SMS/MMS application". Refer to the table below.

ID	Operating System	SMS/MMS Application	Official
android	Android 5.0+	SMS Backup & Restore	❌
win10	Windows 10 Mobile	contacts+message backup	✔️

Usage

⚠️ Warning

To avoid potential data loss, backup the SMS/MMS data on your destination device before doing any restorations.

This repository includes some test input files. Rather than using fake phone numbers, these files simply use the names of Star Wars characters (you get to be Obi-wan Kenobi). Here is a command that demonstrates converting from Windows 10 Mobile to Android:

python3 text_me.py --from win10 --to android --phone "Obi-wan Kenobi" tests/static/win10.msg

ℹ️ Note

--phone is only required when converting to Android. With Android MMS attachments, not listing the sender's address—even when you are the sender—results in a non-fatal "Unrecognized sender" error.

The given input files will have their messages concatenated without duplicate checking. This is useful for Windows Phone where SMS and MMS are stored in separate backup files. By default, this program preserves document order. To sort the messages from oldest to newest, include --sort.