Talkyto - Twilio Calls & SMS

Many concerns are now resolved and this is becoming a valuable part of our telephony tech stack. I have used this individually for months, testing it out, and I used to hesitate to add team members due to the UI glitches that would give me more tech support work than desired. But many of the prior concerns noted are not a problem any longer. This works a lot better and switching from Wi-Fi to cellular data no longer crashes the app or causes follow up calls to fail without a force reboot of the app.

I have been using this app for a few years now to manage phone numbers for my business. Unfortunately, there do not appear to be better options available for using Twilio phone numbers. This application supports text messaging, phone calls, and media messages. However, it is full of bugs and quality of life problems. For example, new text messages rarely appear in threads, requiring you to manually refresh the thread to see new messages. Similarly, it seems that every new version of iOS breaks the notification system for this application, and I spontaneously start missing incoming phone calls and text messages. The support team will acknowledge the problem, but will make no effort to contact users proactively when the issue arises. The application also occasionally spontaneously deletes all of my Twilio API data, meaning I have to log back into Twilio and copy everything over, with downtime of unknown duration occurring without my knowledge. I wish that there was a better alternative, but for now this is all that there is. Support for Twilio numbers is a ripe area for a competitor to put this app completely out of business. And I won’t be upset about it.

It mostly works despite the UI being clunky. You really need to understand Twilio on a deep level to make this work. Seems to be made for engineers. Outbound calling doesn’t work and notifications are unreliable. Noticeable lag in app. Contacts say “Unknown” until you manually refresh. Speaking of, you need to manually refresh conversations regularly and the messages appear out of order when using it to have a conversation. Be ready to force close and restart it quite a bit. Incoming calls seem to be reliable. Having said all that, I haven’t found anything else out there that lets you use twilio as replacement numbers on a mobile device, so if you’re willing to learn the unique way this app works, you can get by.