[General Questions and Answers] sumsel:
Hi there,

I have been looking for such a tool for while and have tried several things so far. My attempts have not been very satisfactory so now I come here looking for help. Maybe it is very simple and I only need a quick pointer.

I try to achieve the following:

- Read SMS (text message) which arrive on a SIM card in my android phone, which sits in a home WiFi, while I am travelling abroad.

- I have another android device on me, and a laptop with windows, so one of those devices should be able to read such incoming SMS, through an internet connection. Whether I read the native text message, or an email that has been generated from that text, is of no importance.

I need this for home banking, I get transaction codes by SMS, and I have already experienced situations where international roaming is incapable of receiving SMS when I take the SIM card with me (I think Dominican Republic and Cambodia were countries where text messages wouldn't come through). So I try to leave one sim at home and hope to be able to access it on the run. In a number of occasions, I needed a person at home to physically pick up that phone and read that code to me, so I could wire some money somewhere. For obvious reasons I try to automate this, so I can myself get hold of the text message remotely without human assistance.

Requirements:

- Must bee maintenance-free,

- must not require manual interaction with the phone that receives the original text message,

- no requirement about visible or stealthy mode (not important, it's my own phone anyways),

- must be able to wake up the phone,

- must be reliable,

- preferably without a third-party server

- must work through internet connection (no local USB, not the same WiFi etc.)

I would like this to be free, but if there is a cheap paid option (once-off purchase) which does exactly what I need, I'll buy.

What I have tried so far:

- SMS Relay Service / gateway app. I tried several apps which didn't work, sticked with one which worked, but not reliably enough: It wouldn't wake up the phone when a message arrived, so I'd ring the phone when I expected a message and even then sometimes the messages didn't get relayed, sometimes the server app needed a reboot to work again. It worked often, but I am looking for something that works reliably, and when I am nowhere near the phone for a long time (= months).

- TeamViewer Host has been a great option for a long time, and when I had that working, I stopped looking for new alternatives. Reliable server app which worked on one of my phones (an old samsung). But they now decided to arbitrarily stop free non-commercial use by blocking selected accounts, and of course they picked mine straight away and won't reply to my message concerning my use. So TeamViewer is no option any more. I strongly assume that my usage pattern is exactly that of commercial users (device sits unattended for a long long time and then receives a request for remote contol - I assume vending machines with remote maintenance have that pattern also so I can't blame TeamViewer's algorithm to pick up on me)

- AirDroid worked fine while in the same wifi. Remote connection not supported in the free version at least.

My requirements also match the abilities of spyware, so I did a quick search on those. My findings suggested however that spyware might not be for me, because good spyware is costly, free spyware is risky, and spyware in general provides a lot more functionality than I require.

Now I hope somebody can prod me into the right direction for further research and testing.

Thanks a lot in advance!