Google Play / communication / GO SMS PRO - MESSENGER, FREE T
REVIEW
GO SMS Pro is a relic of an Android era you shouldn't return to.
A 2011-vintage SMS replacement, still updated, still ad-supported, and still carrying the reputational weight of a 2020 disclosure that exposed users' shared media on an unsecured public bucket.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
GO SMS Pro - Messenger, Free T
VIDEO EDITOR & VIDEO MAKER DEV
OUR SCORE
5.2
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 3.8
PRICE
Free
GO SMS Pro is fifteen years old and feels it. The app first shipped in 2011, back when replacing Android’s stock messaging client with something more colourful was a thing people actually did, and back when the GOMO family of system utilities — GO Launcher, GO Keyboard, GO Battery Saver, GO SMS Pro — was a recognisable shelf at the front of the Play Store. That world is gone. Google Messages handles RCS, end-to-end encrypts threads with other Messages users, filters spam at the network level, and ships on every non-Samsung Android device by default. The case for a third-party SMS replacement in 2026 is narrow, and GO SMS Pro is not the narrow case it serves.
The app does have one genuine strength, which is theming. If you want your text threads to look like something other than a Material You palette, GO SMS Pro’s theme store has more options than any competitor — fifteen years of community-submitted skins, applied in one tap. For a small audience that genuinely cares about this, the app is still the answer.
The honest review has to start with the 2020 disclosure. In November of that year, Trustwave SpiderLabs published a write-up showing that the app’s media-sharing feature uploaded user-shared images, voice notes, and video to a publicly accessible bucket with sequential, guessable URLs. The disclosure said Trustwave was unable to get a response from the developer, and the issue sat unpatched. The story was covered by Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, and ZDNet at the time. An SMS app is the wrong place to economise on trust, and GO SMS Pro is the wrong place to economise on an SMS app.
An SMS app is the wrong place to economise on trust, and GO SMS Pro is the wrong place to economise on an SMS app.
FEATURES
GO SMS Pro is a replacement for the stock Android Messages app, first released in 2011 by the GOMO family of Android utilities — a constellation of Android skins, keyboards, launchers, and system tools historically associated with Cheetah Mobile and its affiliates. The app handles SMS and MMS, layers theming and emoji packs over the conversation view, and supports a "private box" feature for password-locked threads. Stickers, GIF search, scheduled messages, and bulk send are all in the box.
It is free, ad-supported, and does not gate features behind an in-app purchase tier — the monetisation is impression-based, served inside the app's interface and on theme-browsing screens. On the current Play listing the developer attribution reads "Video Editor & Video Maker Dev", a renaming consistent with how the GO-branded utilities have been repackaged and reassigned over time.
The 3.77 average rating across ~389,000 reviews on Play is the relevant signal. For an app this old in a category this commoditised, that's a low number — Google Messages and Samsung Messages both sit comfortably higher, and the trend in GO SMS Pro's recent ratings is down, not up.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The theming engine is the one thing GO SMS Pro does better than the platform defaults. If you genuinely want a bubble-by-bubble custom skin on your text threads — a specific colour, a specific font, a specific background — the app's theme store has fifteen years of community-submitted work behind it, and applying a theme takes one tap. Google Messages does not pretend to offer this.
The private-box feature, despite the history we'll get to in a moment, is conceptually sound: PIN-locked threads that don't appear in the main conversation list. For users who share a device, the idea is reasonable. The execution is where it falls apart.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
In November 2020, Trustwave SpiderLabs publicly disclosed that GO SMS Pro's media-sharing feature uploaded images, voice notes, and video to a publicly accessible cloud storage endpoint with a sequential, guessable URL scheme — meaning any media a user sent through the app was, in principle, retrievable by anyone who could iterate the URL space. Trustwave reported they were unable to reach the developer, the disclosure was published, and the vulnerability went unpatched for an extended window. Public reporting at the time (Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, ZDNet) put the affected install base in the hundreds of millions. That story is the single most important fact about this app.
The wider context matters too. The GOMO / Cheetah Mobile family of Android apps has a documented track record of Play Store actions — multiple apps from associated developers were removed by Google in 2018 and 2020 over ad-fraud SDK behaviour and policy violations. None of that is GO SMS Pro specifically, but the family resemblance is the wrong family resemblance for an app that handles your text messages.
Ad density inside the current app is high enough that the experience of opening a conversation is interrupted by interstitials and banner placements that the stock Messages app, by definition, does not show.
CONCLUSION
GO SMS Pro still works, still themes, and still has a private box. None of that overcomes the disclosure history or the ad load. Google Messages handles RCS, end-to-end encryption with other RCS users, and spam filtering at a level GO SMS Pro does not attempt. Samsung Messages, on Samsung hardware, is a credible alternative without the lineage problem. Install one of those.