Ubox-Smart SMS Inbox review: an intelligent must-have replacement
Managing spam messages in an email system is pretty easy and you have many features that are built in place that can automatically detect spam. However, the same on the SMS platform is presently not available from smartphone manufacturers. If you get an SMS from some telemarketers or an unwanted advertisement as a text, you cannot filter it automatically.
With growing businesses today, telemarketers are constantly calling people for sales leads. Truecaller has been one of the best apps out there that detects and blocks spammers and unwanted telemarketers who keep ruining your day and wasting your time. There are a few companies that provide a similar SMS spam filter in the operating system itself, but you are not expected to opt for those smartphones all the time. To curb spam SMS, there are a bunch of apps available out there that can help you filter out unwanted spammers and keep them at bay.
One such app for Android users is Ubox. The app is a simple internet-connected SMS utility, similar to what Truecaller is for voice calls. Ubox is a replacement or an alternative to the stock SMS/messages app on your smartphone. The app helps you segregate all incoming text messages into various categories and makes it easier for you to spot the genuinely important ones from the spam. So if you are receiving a lot of spam messages, you could end up losing your important text messages in the long list of messages.
To curb this, Ubox categorises each incoming text message into various fields. For example, messages from banks will be categorised and moved into the banking folder. Similarly, Bookings, Promotions and Updates are moved into their respective folders. All messages from your contacts will be moved into a single folder since they are the important ones. Additionally, if you are constantly receiving updates from a particular service and are important, you can also create your own custom category and mark the messages to land up there. Similar is the case as emails where you can set rules for particular emails to be moved into different locations or folders.
Ubox is powerful and has the ability to maintain a database online. Similar to Truecaller, Ubox is a service that gets its database of spam numbers from multiple users that use them. Collectively, it creates a combined database and updates all the apps on all phones accordingly.
Once you install the app, you can start using it right away. All you need to do is to register yourself once and replace the stock messaging app with Ubox. Once active, Ubox will decide whether the incoming message is a spam or important and place it in the respective folder accordingly. However, in cases where Ubox fails to discover the importance of the message or if it does not recognise the number, it will store it separately and ask/alert you to take charge and identify if the sender is a contact or spam. Additional features include blocking of senders, setting ringtones, enabling vibrations, searching of messages, searching contacts by name or numbers, and automatic learning from your daily messages and actions. You can also follow senders so that they are listed higher and alerted accordingly, and you will never miss out on important messages. Correction of spammers is also available. If a particular contact is a spammer for someone, and you know that it is not, you can set the filter to divert it to your inbox instead of marking it as spam. You can also select and delete multiple messages together. You can even turn off notifications for particular categories—for example, if you keep getting promo messages, you can keep it on silent and check it later.
However, there were a few shortfalls of the app and developers need to look into the same. For example, there is no read receipts option when sending a message. No options to send single message to multiple contacts at once. You can mark messages as read, but not the other way around. Lastly, when you open the app, it takes you to the ‘home’ section where all the messages from all categories are listed in line. You have to swipe left and select categories that you want to look into. It would have been nice if the categories showed up on the initial screen. There is also no option for backing up or exporting your SMS in case you need to safely store it, or migrate from one phone to another. Backing up with an online storage, such as Google Drive, would have been a boon. Last, but not the least, we found this hilarious—after registering, we have been getting an email everyday from co-founder of Ubox, Caith Arora, which welcomes you to using Ubox. In short—it looks like Caith is spamming you on email, but protecting you on the SMS front.
Ubox is a great alternative to your SMS app. the app is completely free, easy to use and definitely effective to curb unwanted text from wasting your time. However, there is quite a lot of room for improvement and we assume the developers are constantly at work to better the app. Hopefully the app will remain ad-free as it is now. Click on the link here to install the app if you wish to give it a swing.
