Android sms on samsung phone problems

bangobango
edited November 2016 in Android VPN Setup
Hi

I've ran into a problem with the Samsung galaxy and PIA app on the phone. The vpn works just fine while browsing, but sending texts always fail on the innate sms messaging app that is installed on the phone. Turning the PIA app off, disabling it, forcing it to stop under app control doesn't resolve the issue either.

Skype, Whats app all work fine as they're using data, but general sms is failing every time.

I've spoke to the support from the company and got a message saying that googles coding with sms is not allowing the PIA app to send messages through the vpn. I'll cut and paste the explanation below:



Thanks for contacting us today. VPN connections affect all IP-based traffic, including MMS messaging. This is because it uses standard data to send/receive such traffic. However, SMS has always only used cell-signal based technology, and was completely exempt, so technologies like VPNs wouldn't affect it in any way. However, it seems that Google has re-coded how SMS works in newer releases of DroidOS. There are now 2 types of SMS; text SMS, and data/binary SMS. This isn't the same as MMS; this is actually normal everyday texting, but being forced over data.

This is entirely unique to Android, and seems to be set at a code-level, instead of a setting which can be configured or changed. Because of this, there is no workaround for this, and texts would need to be made without the VPN. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Let us know if you have any further questions.

As you can probably gather I had further questions about why the app hasn't got a notification of this for Android users if it's a known thing. Anyway this aside, I proceeded to uninstall the PIA application from my phone in the correct manner. As follows:

  • Go to Settings > Apps and locate PIA VPN
  • Scroll down through the app detail, locate the Cache section, and click the Clear cache
  • Scroll back up and click Uninstall
  • Reboot your device
And guess what, it still didn't fix the issue. I was then at a loss as to what I could do about the matter. Obviously something has altered my sms abilities and I'm fairly confident it's not something I have done.

So next I was asked to speak to a third party vendor IE Samsung to fix the problem and come onto the forums. Now I know this is an issue some of the other Android users have experienced. The last bit of advice is a factory reset, and if that's what this PIA app forced me to do it's not exactly a good solution or advert for the app itself.


Soooooo long story short anyone else experienced this issue or something similar and been able to resolve it without a factory reset ?


TLDR: PIA app broke phone, uninstalled correctly, PIA app still broke phone, derp and more derp , how can I fixes it ?
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