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Best SMS solution for iPhone

pcunite

pcunite

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 26, 2010
97
2
My wife and I both have iPhones 4's running iOS 5 so iMessage is great for us. I would love to drop our $30 per month texting plan, but my wife has several friends with Android and Blackberry devices.

What is the solution, make all her friends install some third paryt app? I doubt I could make that happen. I would like, whatever it would be, to appear native on each phone, that would help. Also being able to fallback to SMS would be nice.

Anyone else tired of paying for SMS?
 
pcunite said:
My wife and I both have iPhones 4's running iOS 5 so iMessage is great for us. I would love to drop our $30 per month texting plan, but my wife has several friends with Android and Blackberry devices.

What is the solution, make all her friends install some third paryt app? I doubt I could make that happen. I would like, whatever it would be, to appear native on each phone, that would help. Also being able to fallback to SMS would be nice.

Anyone else tired of paying for SMS?
Click to expand...

Google voice.
 
pcunite said:
My wife and I both have iPhones 4's running iOS 5 so iMessage is great for us. I would love to drop our $30 per month texting plan, but my wife has several friends with Android and Blackberry devices.

What is the solution, make all her friends install some third paryt app? I doubt I could make that happen. I would like, whatever it would be, to appear native on each phone, that would help. Also being able to fallback to SMS would be nice.

Anyone else tired of paying for SMS?
Click to expand...


Theres a few options:

Google Voice

TextFree

Textme

All provide a unique number. My wife and I are on Google Voice
 
outside of the US (because contrary to popular belief, not everyone is American) I recommend TextPlus, it gave me a free phone number and unlimited sms.
 
+1 Google Voice

And if you are jailbroken, even better. There is a jailbreak app called SMS GV extension, which once set up, your Google Voice SMS come through the native messages app, and texts you send from native messages app go from your Google Voice. If you want to send from your regular number, you can simply flip a switch in settings or SBSettings and send from your regular number.

I gave everyone who didn't have IOS 5, and thus imessage, my Google Voice number as my new number, and cancelled my sms plan with AT&T. 20/mo back in my pocket.

I also installed Phone GV extension by the same dev, so when I call from native phone app, I can choose "Carrier" or "Google Voice" dial.

Solutions like the above are why I cannot move from my 4 to 4S until 4S has a jailbreak.

If not jailbroken, you can use the Google Voice app, which with Push on, is still very functional and you get 99+ percent of your SMS with no issues, just have to go through app instead of native messages.
 
How well does google voice work? Specifically, how well do the push sms messages work? Are they pretty instantaneous?
 
ET: google voice would be good, bc i think they have some kind of sprint integration now with mms? i forget, check out their blog
dannn said:
How well does google voice work? Specifically, how well do the push sms messages work? Are they pretty instantaneous?
Click to expand...
also, i'd appreciate any more info on my original q
 
dannn said:
ET: google voice would be good, bc i think they have some kind of sprint integration now with mms? i forget, check out their blog
Click to expand...

Thanks. It seems though that "google voice" disabled international texting except for Canada. I do appreciate the reply though..... I'll just add Sprint's International Texting for now, until something better surfaces. Thanks.
 
Thanks to the suggestions for Google Voice. It seems to work well. How does the push SMS messages reach my phone using my new Google number? If I get a SMS block on my real iPhone number will they still make it in to the app?
 
pcunite said:
How does the push SMS messages reach my phone using my new Google number? If I get a SMS block on my real iPhone number will they still make it in to the app?
Click to expand...

I think I may have found the answer to my own question. It is called C2DM Notifications. Basically, the last IP address you use to open up the GVoice app tells Google the iPhone's IP address. When you close down the GVoice app on the iPhone, and you get a SMS text to your GVoice number, Google sends an Internet C2DM packet to port 5228 on the iPhone using the last IP addres it has on file.

If you have wifi or celluar data turned on at that moment the iPhone will open up the GVoice app (if it is not already running) and hand over the data to the application.

Pretty sweet.

Now my question is ... since I'm turning celluar data on and off, and therefore on wifi (which changes based on where I'm at) it seems that I might lose this push notification. It seems that might be best to leave data on all the time, which with the money saved might be okay.

I wonder how iMessages handles wifi IP address changes? It must update the iMessage Servers when it sees you have a new IP address or new wifi connection. I wished GV did this. I need to test.
 
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