A Claude Skill that helps fix broken texts after switching to a de-Googled phone.
Switched to a flip phone, a dumbphone, a de-Googled phone, or a privacy phone and now your texts are broken? Group chats not working? Missing messages from iPhone friends?
This tool helps you figure out what's wrong and walks you through the best available fixes — without switching to a new app or giving up your privacy setup.
Web version of the SMS Setup and Troubleshooting guide here: SMS Setup and Troubleshooting guide
Download the guide here: SMS Setup and Troubleshooting guide
An honest note: SMS and the broader messaging ecosystem are genuinely messy right now. RCS is still being rolled out unevenly across carriers and devices, iMessage deregistration has quirks, and carrier provisioning is inconsistent. This troubleshooter covers everything we know, but some problems don't have a clean fix yet. If you try everything and things are still broken, it may not be you. It may just be where the technology is right now. We'll keep updating this as we learn more.
This is a skill — a set of instructions you add to Claude AI (a free AI assistant from Anthropic) that teaches it how to troubleshoot SMS and MMS problems specific to de-Googled and privacy phones.
Once installed, you can describe your texting problem in plain English and Claude will ask you the right questions and walk you through a fix, step by step.
It will never tell you to:
- Switch to Signal, WhatsApp, or any other app
- Turn on Google services
- Give up your privacy setup
It's built to fix standard SMS/MMS — the same texts that work on every phone.
- ❌ Texts not sending or delivering
- ❌ Not receiving texts from certain people
- ❌ Group chats broken or missing messages
- ❌ Photos and videos (MMS) not coming through
- ❌ iPhone friends' messages not arriving
- ❌ Messages going as individual texts instead of a group
- ✅ Works with most SMS apps
- Go to claude.ai
- Click Sign Up and create a free account
- Click the green Code button at the top of this page
- Click Download ZIP
- Open the ZIP file on your computer — you'll see a file called
sms-troubleshooter.skill
Prefer the terminal?
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/fix-my-texts.git
Skills require this setting to work:
- Go to claude.ai and sign in
- Click your profile icon in the top right corner
- Click Settings
- Click Capabilities in the left sidebar
- Make sure Code execution and file creation is toggled ON
- In the left sidebar, click Customize
- Click Skills
- Click the + button, then Create skill
- Upload the
sms-troubleshooter.skillfile
That's it. The skill is now active.
Open a new chat on claude.ai and describe your problem in plain English. For example:
"My group texts stopped working after I switched phones"
"I'm not getting texts from my friend who has an iPhone"
"My photos aren't sending in group chats"
"I'm about to switch to a de-Googled phone — how do I keep my texts working?"
Claude will ask you a few follow-up questions and walk you through a fix.
- Mention your phone type — Light Phone, SLEKE. Phone, Sunbeam F1 Pro, GrapheneOS, etc. if you know it
- Mention your carrier — T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, etc. Some fixes are carrier-specific
- Say what you've already tried — saves time
- SIM or eSIM? — Claude will likely ask, so have this ready
The free version of Claude works great for this. If you hit a message limit:
- Wait a few hours and try again (free limits reset daily)
- Or start a new chat and describe the issue again
This Skill is meant to be a public good, not a SLEKE. product. The more people contribute fixes, carrier-specific quirks, and hard-won troubleshooting knowledge, the more useful it becomes for everyone making the switch to a de-Googled phone.
The SLEKE. team will keep updating this as we learn new things from support calls and the community. But we can't do it alone. The ecosystem moves fast, carriers change behavior, and new Android & ROM versions bring new quirks.
If you found a fix that worked, hit a dead end the skill couldn't solve, or spotted something outdated:
- Open an Issue to report a gap or problem
- Open a Pull Request to add or improve content
- The main knowledge base lives in
sms-troubleshooter/references/sms-guide.md— plain text, easy to edit, no coding needed
Every contribution makes this better for the next person switching phones.
Built by the team at SLEKE while doing customer support for people switching to de-Googled phones. We kept seeing the same problems over and over, so we turned our support knowledge into an open-source tool anyone can use. Much of our intial knowledge came from a YouTube Video published by Dumbphone Ninja Jose Briones.
MIT — free to use, share, and build on. See LICENSE for details.