r/voipms

I've been using VoIP.ms for a few years now. Messaging has always been annoying. Groundwire works, but only for SMS, so I had to turn on email notifications not to miss any long messages/MMS. Now I get double notifications for a single message, and I have to cross-reference the phone number from the email with my contacts. It's... annoying.

There's an app for Android, but not iOS, so I made one for myself. I've been using it for the past few months and I'm quite happy with it. I figured I might as well polish it up to make it public, too.

Some screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/ke0487T

2 things people might care about:

Privacy: I've made the app as private as possible. It only talks to the VoIP.ms API. There's no telemetry. For push notifications, I built a proxy server to forward URL callbacks to Apple's Push Notification service. The only thing sent through the proxy is your device token. I can't see the message content, the sender or the recipient. When a notification arrives, the app fetches the actual message directly from the API.

Cost: The app will stay free during TestFlight, but the push notifications server costs money to run, and I'd like to at least cover the expenses. I like donationware, but I'm not sure if I'll get enough donations to cover the cost. A more practical solution is to make push notifications a paid feature. I'm hoping TestFlight will help me figure out how many users there'll be and what the server costs will look like. If I go that route, the subscription would likely be around $5/year at most, less if there are more paying users to share the cost.

Please don't solely rely on this app while in beta. Things might be broken. There are still a few rough edges, and I'm hoping people can help me catch more bugs before launch too.

Here's the TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/HPZnUyJ1. Let me know what you think!