android - How to get only most recent SMS to use in conversation view?

Question

I am trying to create an sms conversation list. I am using this code to get a cursor:

Cursor cursor = activity.getContentResolver().query(Uri.parse("content://sms/inbox"), null, null, null, null); 

The problem is that when I use the cursor, I get multiple messages from one contact. I am trying to get only the most recent message from all contacts so that I can show them in a recyclerview as a list of conversations.

Thanks in advance!?

Answer 1

Querying the "content://sms/conversations" URI (Telephony.Sms.Conversations.CONTENT_URI) will return a summary of each conversation, with the "snippet" column (Telephony.Sms.Conversations.SNIPPET) being the last message in each.

This query will also return with a "msg_count" column (Telephony.Sms.Conversations.MESSAGE_COUNT) - which is pretty self-explanatory - and a "thread_id" column (Telephony.Sms.Conversations.THREAD_ID), which can be used to retrieve a complete conversation, by querying with that ID appended to the conversations URI. For example:

String threadId = ...
Uri convoUri = Telephony.Sms.Conversations.CONTENT_URI
               .buildUpon().appendPath(threadId).build();

Do note that these queries will return only SMS messages. If you want MMS as well, Telephony.Mms and Telephony.MmsSms have similar URIs.