Android 9 Development Cookbook - Third Edition

Reading existing SMS messages

First, to read existing messages, you'll need the following permission:

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

Here's an example of getting a cursor using the SMS content provider:

Cursor cursor = getContentResolver().query(        Uri.parse("content://sms/"), null, null, null, null);while (cursor.moveToNext()) {    textView.append("From :" + cursor.getString(1) + " : " + cursor.getString(11)+"\n");}

At the time of writing, the SMS content provider has over 30 columns. Here are the first 12, which are the most useful (remember, the column count starts at zero):

0. _id
1. thread_id
2. address
3. person
4. date
5. protocol
6. read
7. status
8. type
9. reply_path_present
10. subject
11. body