Textie – Cross Platform Messenger App for iPhone, iPad and Android Devices

Ever since I got my 4th Generation iPad, I have been exploring the App Store to try different iPad apps which make my day-to-day tasks easier. My recent app hunt has been for cross-platform messaging apps using which I can connect to my friends and family members irrespective of the mobile OS platform they are on – Android or iOS.

There are some options like iMessages and Whatsapp using which you can send IM and photos to your friends but both have a small issue if all of your friends don’t share the common platform of operating systems. For example, iMessages can be used on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch but as it is native to only iOS devices, you can’t connect to your loved ones on Android.

Similarly, Whatsapp is a quite famous option which you might think to use on cross platforms. It’s true that you can use it on both iOS and Android platforms but on iOS, Whatsapp is restricted to only iPhone.

Hence, like me if you are also looking for a common app which can be used to send instant messages and photos between all iOS and Android devices, Textie Messaging is a beautiful and easy-to-use app which can be installed on any iOS device (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and all Android devices. If you know how to use the native iOS or Android messaging app, you already know how to use Textie!

Textie is a simple and pretty powerful texting appliation that offers unlimited use. So, you can send any number of texts and other media to your friends on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and any Android phone and, you don’t have to pay a penny (ever!) to do that. Although, there are a few advertisements which would get displayed in the message stream (which you can get rid of by upgrading to the ad free version at £1.49).

Textie has been developed by the creators of famous apps, Tweetie and Borange. Tweetie was later on acquired by Twitter.

Below I have listed down some of the main features of Textie:

• Cross Platform IM and photo sharing app for iOS and Android devices
• Textie lets you send messages to any other textie user, any email address and most U.S. mobile phones
• Textie is beautiful, fast and easy to use
• Simple interface
• Messages can be sent app-to-app or app-to-email, irrespective of the app installed or not
• iOS 5 and iPad Support

Textie messaging app also supports Emoji keyboard using which you can also use smileys and emoticons in your textie messages. Check out this article to enable Emoji on your iOS device.

Textie is one of the very few cross platform IM and photo sharing apps and has a lot of nice features which make you fall in love with it. Although, while using it, I do feel that there are a few things which need some attention to make it the best.

• I also came across a certain delay in the delivery of messages (quite slower than Whatsapp, which is almost instant!)
• Some of the messages don’t deliver at all (I did miss some of them!)

The above issues could be due to the intermittent load on the textie servers and I am going to test this app for quite some time before coming to any conclusion with the app.

And, overall we do think this app deserves a rating of 4/5.

Also, if the developers are reading this post, can we please have Whatsapp for iPad? 😉