[XDA Assist] marshra:
What I have:

Both phones are stock. The g4 is using the system.rooted.H81110h.img

Galaxy S4 T-Mobile running 4.4.4. Original phone

Purchased T-mobile G4 running lollipop (didn't upgrade it yet)

Just want my messages of my deceased family.

I've gone as far as I could on my own. I need help and am willing to pay for it. Whatever solution that comes up will be (hopefully) useful to others. No one should have to go through what I have. I will lay out the steps I've taken and while I was unsucessful it doesn't mean I did everything right. I have been all over the internet and haven't been able to find much in the way of solutions so I pieced together a whole bunch of stuff.

First of all I want to punch the people at android in the face. No...seriously .I do.

Why in GOD'S NAME is it so HARD to do a SIMPLE thing like restoring your messages? Like I'm SHOCKED at the fact that they seemingly don't want this to ever happen.

They have gone to great lengths to ensure it doesn't happen and I'm seriously confused as to why. At every turn I've literally run into roadblocks that apparently are there for "my protection" like wtf people? I have messages of people who are now deceased and would it be that *&$&*#$& hard to put them into a new phone? I'm sorry, I'm upset, pissed off, and bewildered at how hard this is to do. Like. Literally. STUPID HARD.

I'm on the verge of tears and I have literally spend 3 weeks trying to import my MMS / SMS. I've purchased software, I've tried bribery, I've rooted my phone, extracted the mmssms.db file of the old and new. And I literally spend the last 3 days pasting all this crap into the new database. I've exported it to CSV where needed

Here is what I have tried:

1. sms backup and restore. By far the simplist. After literally 4 days of importing it finally was done. However, all of my picture mail was at the bottom of the thread. And some messages...actually a LOT of messages....were showing up at the time it imported. NOT the time it was sent. Like wtf? I opened up messanger....opened each thread....waited......some were fixed by what I found online to be a solution.

2. Purchased some software. This software (backuptrans). after 5 days. Yes FIVE days..it actually did a good job. All of them were on the right date...however....they don't support group messages....Yes. You heard me right. They thought a "solution" would be to convert every group message threat into individual ones.

Example:

group message with 10 people.

Every message you sent to the group is now shown as a sent message 10 times. One time to each person in the individual thread.

Those people's replies will show up in the corresponding individual thread.

your replies show up in all ten.

So what you have is a conversation that literally is useless. Try having a side conversation or multiple group messages with similar people at the same time...and you will quickly see why I was quite upset after 5 days of watching my new phone (which I only got because my S4 has the infamous "You removed your sim card! Let's restart!" bullcrap

Added backuptrans people to the people I want to punch in the face

3. Rooted. Copied MMSMS over and this ended up with com.phone.android has stopped. Was worth a try. I'm on kitkat...this new G4 is on lollipop. They changed the structure from what I read online.

4. No big deal right? I'll take a copy of the new database and the old one. Reimport?

Downloaded razorSQL, exported each table into SQL. Reimported when it accepted the SQL until it hit tables where they didn't match up. IE column names were wrong or one had a column the other did not.

So then I exported to CSV for both new and old. Opened the old, matched the columns up, and pasted into the new format CSV and reimported that.

Did this for all tables that matched up until I got to threads. Threads wouldn't import because it gave me a _INSERT_THREAD wasn't a function. After some reasearch it was some trigger that was there...so I'm like.. well.. can't do much with that. I ended up removing the trigger which I THINK...because I honestly don't have a clue... only helps with the indexing?

CREATE TRIGGER callback_on_insert_threads AFTER INSERT ON threads BEGIN SELECT _INSERT_THREAD(new._id); END

deleted that. Imported the CSV. And created the trigger again.

Between importing, exporting, etc. This took me about 3 days.

I had a hunch that there HAS TO be a database upgrade script. I found this page:

https://android.googlesource.com/pl...providers/telephony/MmsSmsDatabaseHelper.java

I think this might help someone but I again am not a programmer and have no clue what that all means.

There has been lolipop upgrades for other carriers...but not t-mobile....

Could we perhaps take an upgrade script from them that would convert 4.4.4 to lollipop?

Do I dare as if we can do the same from lollipop to marshmellow? The G4 will eventually

What complicates things further is that each manufacture uses different database structures. I'm not sure of the reasoning, however, this seems quite crazy and again android should step in and standardize things.

4. For whatever reason on my S4 I can't export into XML. Crashes on titanium backup. So that's why I used sms backup and restore.

5. Tried to import xml file from sms backup and restore into titanium backup and it crashes.

Hopefully someone can help :(