MightyText: the app all iPhone users wish they had

You can use Skype to call people, use your phone to e-mail people and use your tablet to watch videos.

You can use Skype to call people, use your phone to e-mail people and use your tablet to watch videos. But if you think about it carefully, what’s the one thing you’ve only ever been able to do on a singular device? Texting. Well, until now. Thanks to MightyText, that is no longer the case…

 

 

You then can install the app onto your computer here or onto your tablet, log in using the same Google account, and you’re set up! On your computer, the app runs through a Google Chrome Extension, so you only receive small unobtrusive text notifications from your taskbar (which you can set to ‘Do Not Disturb’ if you wish).

 

When you open the app, you have two choices of how to view your messages: in ‘Classic View’, where you can scroll through and select SMS conversations individually as you would on a typical Android phone, or ‘Power View’, where you can see many conversations at once, like Facebook.

 

The app syncs your contact names and images from your phone so you can tell who’s who, and it also notifies you of phone calls and the battery life of your phone, no matter how far away it is.

 

New features include the ability to sync the photos and videos you take on your phone to your computer, which you can also add effects to like on Instagram, and you can now send SMS messages through Gmail, like you would in a hangout window.

 

 

Although the app as been around for well over a year now, it is just reaching its height of popularity with over 4 million users. But why is it so popular? Why would you want to text from your computer?

 

Firstly, it groups everything into one place – personally, as a student journalist, it proves very useful to be able to follow up a story without having to switch between phone and computer, and also to copy quotes from students into an article from an SMS message, which I was not previously able to do. The use of a Google account makes the app even better, as it means that you can access MightyText, no matter what computer you are using, just by signing in.

 

Imagine the possibilities. You’re at work or in a lecture and can’t use your phone. MightyText takes away this horrific inconvenience by even allowing you to text from your work inbox. It also saves you battery; although the device has to be turned on to route SMS messages via your phone (as of course you still have to pay to send SMS messages as you normally would), you wouldn’t be constantly turning the screen on to send a text.

 

 

The app was originally launched as an Android equivalent to iMessage which you could access on any device – but then the founders discovered that because the connection is so secure, it can be used to transfer pretty much anything.

 

MightyText has hit a particularly excellent USP because before now, parts of phone technology such as SMS messages did not translate well to computers.

 

Speaking to VentureBeat, co-founder Maneesh Arora said: “Everything on your phone should be everywhere all the time.

 

“No one raves about iCloud, and we feel there’s an opportunity. There will soon be billions of Android devices, and no one’s making it easy.

 

“We have some professional features coming soon, such as scheduling texts, managing multiple phones, a B2B play for enterprises, especially as BlackBerry moves out of the enterprise and companies need to manage 50 or 50,000 devices centrally.”

 

So aside from perhaps moving towards Apple, it appears that MightyText has an overwhelming number of opportunities available to it. It’ll certainly be exciting to see the app’s popularity grow, and find out whether it will change the face of social media.