SMS Tasks Control Android Device Remotely via SMS

In this day and age, when most of us have excessive dependence on technology, losing your phone is a dangerous possibility that risks your personal and private information landing in the wrong hands. Fortunately, there are precautionary measures that can help you avoid living through the worst-case scenario.

By installing SMS Tasks, for instance, you have the ability to control your mobile device remotely by sending simple text messages. Through it, you will be able to track and recover the device, or at least wipe confidential data it contains, when the ill-timed circumstance that your phone or tablet does get lost happens.

SMS Tasks is leaps and bounds ahead of similar apps, since it offers the most sophisticated features to help you regain ownership of your mobile device. To start with, the app offers a customizable passphrase (pass) to accompany all SMS commands, so that only you can remotely control your mobile device. When enabled, SMS Tasks is always running in the background and ready to accept incoming SMS commands.

Control your Android Device via Text/SMS

The commands (followed by their accompanying actions) listed below are just some of what you can send to your main device through another gadget:

  • locate@(pass) – Enable GPS location tracking
  • stop@(pass) – Stop GPS location tracking
  • sdcard@(pass) – Wipe all content in the microSD card (cannot be undone)
  • <reboot@(pass) – Restart your device
  • data@(pass) – Wipe all data in your device and restore it to factory settings (cannot be undone)\
  • alarm@(pass) – Set off the alarm clock

Because of the complexity of commands sent, your phone may require rooting in order to perform the requested actions. Tasks such as wiping the inserted microSD card, resetting the phone/tablet to factory settings, and uninstalling apps even require a special option for them to take effect.

SMS Task developer Joshua Kittle notes that his app has trouble processing user commands when the messaging app GoSMS is also present in the mobile device. Given its design and functionality, the latter is granted top priority for the broadcast receiver, which SMS Task needs to listen to messages. Kittle suggests users to disable or freeze GoSMS, even uninstall it when necessary.

To learn more about this small yet clever app, head over to Kittle’s forum post on XDA Developers, where plenty of other useful apps also await to be discovered. You can download it there.

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