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TextNow: Unlimited Free Texting on Your iPhone or iTouch (Google Voice support too!)
- Thread starter derek13
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Yup, I am one of the developers.
If you guys have any feature requests, feel free to mention it in this thread. If it is possible to implement, we will do our best to implement it into the app for future updates.
Derek, yeah - provide your users with e-mail address that accepts inbound SMS (like TextFree does today).. And put that e-mail address in the "from" field of outbound SMS messages, so that recipient knows who it's from (something that TextFree does NOT do today).
I am sorry to say, but your app in its current form is fairly useless (doesn't matter if it cost $0 and had the prettiest UI). I can just as easily send free outbound SMS's from Google Chat or e-mail or numerous other ways..
As mentioned earlier, the updates are coming and the inbound SMS is coming soon along with other features.
I love this app. What a great price for something that will save me a lot of money. My wife and I can text each other back and forth all day and not spend a penny (we both have this app).
I text my sister (she has unlimited sprint sms) and she always txt's me back on this app so it's all free. I don't understand how anyone can say it's useless.
Best bang for the money.
I text my sister (she has unlimited sprint sms) and she always txt's me back on this app so it's all free. I don't understand how anyone can say it's useless.
Best bang for the money.
I definitely agree. My girlfriend and I both d/l'd the app a few days ago, and have been using it quite often. It's great because I can now downgrade to the 200 texts/month for $5, rather then spend $15/month for 1,500 texts where I don't even use half of them. I am anxiously waiting the update for push!
That's what I use, just the $5 txt plan in case others text me first. Plenty left over. btw, what update for push are you talking about?
If you and your wife both have iPhones - you don't need SMS. Just use IM apps like AIM or Google Chat - they're all free and work great.
Problem with this app is that people cannot initiate SMS to you (yet). So your friends need to send standard SMS to you.. then your reply comes across with some random-generated ID. The response ends up in a different SMS thread than the original message, on phones with threaded SMS, like iPhone. Even if/when inbound SMS is supported - you will likely have these issues (like TextFree does).
It's all a huge pain in the ass and not worth it to me. I simply use free AIM with all my friends with iPhones and other smartphones. And for the rest - that's where $5 / 200 SMS plan comes in.
google chat on the iphone does that? it's not running in the background though and it doesn't have push. or am I missing something?
There is a number of multi-client apps w/Push that support Google Chat. I have IM+ w/Push app that supports gChat (along with other IM providers like AIM).
Just thinking about this some more, here's a feature suggestion to Unlimited SMS developers:
(a) Give the app an option to set outbound SMS sender-ID to the AT&T phone number of the user. This will enable consistent SMS threads on the recipient's phones, and removes confusion with the random-generated sender ID's.
(b) Intercept inbound SMS messages from iPhone's SMS app, and place them inside of the right thread within Unlimited SMS app. This will basically allow Unlimited SMS to replace iPhone's native SMS app.
The benefit here is for those of us with cheap 200-message plans, this app will basically give us free outbound SMS.. avoiding all the inconvenience and confusion with SMS threads, ID's etc. Now, I don't know if (b) is even possible (does API sandbox give access to SMS messages?), or if Apple would allow it.. But thought I'd ask..
According to derek's initial post, push is supposed to available for the next update. For now, my girlfriend and I have to be in the app in order to receive our SMS messages to/from each other.
Unfortunately, Apple does not allow developers to intercept or access default SMS messages on the device.
hey derek13
I just bought your app and it doesn't seem to work at all.
I live in Toronto and I'm on the Rogers network. Before the 2.01 patch came out i was able to send text messages, but the receivers had to subscribe to a $5 a month "email to SMS" service and text "read" to rogers every time they get a text from me. This ends up costing them 15 cents every time they receive a message because essentially they had to send a text message to receive my text.
Now after the update, people i sent texts to don't even get the email to sms message anymore.
On the rogers network the cheapest text plan is $3 at the moment which is only for customers who have a good standing with rogers. The cheapest text plan for regular customers is $5/month which includes unlimited received texts and 120 outgoing.
If we are using your program, they have to subscribe to the email to sms feature which is an additional $5/month.
The regular unlimited text service is $10/month at rogers. So using your program, it would be just as expensive as subscribing to the regular rogers unlimited text.
I just bought your app and it doesn't seem to work at all.
I live in Toronto and I'm on the Rogers network. Before the 2.01 patch came out i was able to send text messages, but the receivers had to subscribe to a $5 a month "email to SMS" service and text "read" to rogers every time they get a text from me. This ends up costing them 15 cents every time they receive a message because essentially they had to send a text message to receive my text.
Now after the update, people i sent texts to don't even get the email to sms message anymore.
On the rogers network the cheapest text plan is $3 at the moment which is only for customers who have a good standing with rogers. The cheapest text plan for regular customers is $5/month which includes unlimited received texts and 120 outgoing.
If we are using your program, they have to subscribe to the email to sms feature which is an additional $5/month.
The regular unlimited text service is $10/month at rogers. So using your program, it would be just as expensive as subscribing to the regular rogers unlimited text.
The 2.1 update should not break the anything as the only that changed was in the UI (the next one after that will only fix push notifications).
As for the Rogers issue you mentioned; yes, the recipient would have to reply with "Read" in order to view the message. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about that because it is the way Rogers decided to implement their network. However, this problem only applies to Rogers and it doesn't apply to the other Canadian carriers (ie. Bell).
Update, 08/21/2009: We have a new beta version that allows users to pick their own username@myusms.net address to receive texts. We need 15 beta testers. If you are interested in beta testing this version, let me know. Thanks!
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