Apple / utilities / GO SMS PRO - COOL THEMES SMS
REVIEW
GO SMS Pro on iPhone is a $1.99 download of nothing.
An SMS replacement app on a platform that does not allow SMS replacement, shipped by a developer whose Android namesake leaked millions of private messages in 2020.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
GO SMS Pro - Cool Themes SMS
HOA NGUYEN
OUR SCORE
1.8
APPLE
★ 1.4
PRICE
$1.99
The App Store sells categories of software that iOS does not actually support. “SMS replacement” is the clearest example. Android lets a user pick a default messaging app and route every text through it; iOS does not, has never, and at no developer conference since the iPhone shipped has hinted that it ever will. iMessage owns the pipe and Apple guards it.
GO SMS Pro on the App Store is $1.99 of that contradiction. It cannot do what the title promises, because the title describes something the operating system structurally forbids. Whatever themes and fonts and bubble colours the screenshots advertise live inside the app’s own four walls — invisible to the recipient, irrelevant to the actual SMS that goes out through the system layer the app cannot reach.
The 1.4-star aggregate rating is the reviewers explaining this to each other one star at a time.
There is no version of iOS where a third-party app can intercept, send, or theme your SMS messages — iMessage owns that pipe and Apple has never opened it.
FEATURES
The store listing promises cool SMS themes, custom fonts, and a prettier messaging experience. None of that touches a real text message on an iPhone. Apple does not expose the SMS or iMessage stack to third-party developers — there is no public API to read, compose, or theme messages outside the system Messages app. The closest any third party gets is the Messages app extension framework, which is sticker packs and iMessage apps inside Apple's own UI.
What actually ships, based on screenshots and user reports, is a self-contained chat-style interface that can render colourful backgrounds and emoji and stylised bubbles inside its own walls. None of that content goes out as an SMS. A buyer expecting to replace the green-bubble experience system-wide gets a $1.99 sandbox that no one outside the app will ever see.
The app is unrelated to the Android "GO SMS Pro" — same name, same theme-pack pitch, different developer credit ("Hoa Nguyen" here) and a separate codebase. The Android app has a long history of its own.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Honest accounting requires admitting the icon is fine and the screenshots load. That is the end of the column. The 1.4-star aggregate rating on the App Store is the buyer reviews telling the same story this review is telling: the app does not do the thing its name implies, and it costs money to find that out.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The premise. iOS will never let a third-party messaging app replace the system SMS handler the way Android can — that capability does not exist on Apple's platform and was not on the roadmap at WWDC 2024 or 2025. Any app on the App Store titled "SMS" or "Messenger" that is not Messages itself is, by Apple's own architectural rules, a parlour trick.
The other issue is the brand. The Android GO SMS Pro suffered a widely-reported 2020 disclosure from Trustwave researchers — millions of private media files (photos, videos, voice messages) sent through the app were stored on an unauthenticated public CDN, indexable by sequential URL. The iOS app is a separate product from a different developer, but it ships under a name that, to anyone who followed the security press, is permanently radioactive. No public statement, no version-history note, no developer page on this iOS listing addresses the association. Buyers who search the name get the breach coverage first.
CONCLUSION
Don't buy this. If your green bubbles bother you, the answer on iPhone is to accept that SMS is a fallback protocol and use iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram for everything else. There is no themeable SMS layer to install on iOS, and a $1.99 app that suggests otherwise is selling a category that does not exist on Apple's platform.