The idea of replacing your text messaging plan with an app and Push Notifications is getting incredibly popular.
Indeed, iPhone app developer company Pinger, the creators of Textfree, told Techcrunch that over the last 9 month, they delivered as much as a Billion text messages through their app.
An important success factor of the service is apparently its capability to integrate with Google Voice, which is indeed extremely convenient. Lastly, this massive usage has allowed the company to finally turn in a profit, making it another App Store success story. Congrats!
Make sure to check out our full review of TextFree, as well as its competition (and my personal favorite) TextNow.
Having tried both, my vote is also for TextNow. The interface is much more polished than TextFree. These apps are great but they still aren’t 100% perfect. Of those billion texts that were processed, how many more failed to process? I’ve had luck with TextNow though. It’s more of a challenge getting your friends to send to your textnow address than to your number. There are two things I want to see these apps accomplish:
1. Make it possible to send one text to many people at once.
2. Make your reply to address your regular textnow(or textfree) address instead of a randomly generated temporary numbered address. I’ve had many friends say, I send you a text and you don’t get it. I find out later that they have saved the temporary random address in their contacts for me.