I’ve tried many different softphone apps. I think Acrobits is very good and worth the one time payment. I would recommend Acrobits Groundwire for the extra few bucks over the Acrobits Softphone app if you need voicemail feature (i.e. automatic notification of new voicemail and ability to just tap voicemail icon to retrieve messages). Yes, the push notifications does work. So, you can actually close the app on iPhone and Android and still get notified of incoming calls. This alone is a great feature because many other softphone apps will only work when they are running or if they do have a push notification feature it may be a premium feature with an extra charge.
I bought it a couple days ago and I am very happy with the application. It works very well, is well integrated, and saves a lot of battery power with the push notifications. I find it much better than all the other softphone solutions I tried so far.
It was a little bit complicated for me to find the right settings to make it work with TLS since the wiki does not say how to, but after that, it just worked! (As one would expect.)
Thank you for sharing your experience, it helped me make try it. And I am quite happy with it.
Yes, there are a lot of options and I am not using them all.
I am very happy with Groundwire and still recommend over any other free or paid app I tried over the years. It did not miss a single call, tells you if it was answered by another device, and very nice on battery life with push notifications.
So the settings I use are:
—Call encryption (a must for all my devices, period). You can see how to implement it here: https://wiki.voip.ms/article/Acrobits_Groundwire#Call_Encryption_-_TLS.2FSRTP
—In the accounts: VoiceMail Number, Display Name, outgoing calls need registration, call waiting, expires at 300, subscription expires at 290; In Messaging, “SIMPLE” mode for SMS, Display calls answered elsewhere.
—Incoming calls: Push notifications.
—Call recording: display button.
—I am not using “Call integration” as it was discouraged due to probable issues on the wiki. But I do not have standard phone service on my device either, just the internet, and VoIP.
—In permissions I did grant “Do Not Disturb Access,” then, of course, mic, phone, contacts.
These are all standard features and I did not try the more advanced ones. But so far, so good.
There wasn’t indeed. I submitted the additional information which they kindly added to the wiki page. It will make things easier for everyone. I will edit my post in this regard (if possible—nope, not possible, this makes too many days already). Thanks!
You are right, there are no other alternative for the price and quality it offers. And frankly, it works really great. Sound is excellent, and just does the job. You forget about it, it just works, and this is what you want at the end of the day.
Hi aleclerc,
Has been a while since I’ve been back on this forum. Glad to hear that Groundwire is working well for you including the push notifications. And thanks for sharing your insights with regards to some of the settings which have now been reflected in the Wiki.
Hi @Snuupy! I did not know about Sipnetic, thanks for mentioning. They have no push notification yet—and I must say that since I have it with Groundwire, and that it works flawlessly for me, I would not go back to anything else.
I personally prefer free/libre software, but I do not mind buying a good product either. It took me a while, but I have zero regrets having tried Groundwire. It just works. Price/quality feels very good.
Yes, I saw your other posts. But this is rather not easy nor simply to implement. (And personally, Linphone’s was not to my taste, but it is open source, if this is what one is looking for.)
After some months using Groundwire, I find this application is worth every single penny. I would not go back to anything else, whether free or open source. I recommend it to everyone now, especially for business use cases.
Thank you for your reply and your efforts on this project for MMS and push notifications with Linphone. Certain persons and use cases will certainly find this useful.
Just curious, is anybody here using CSipSimple softphone? It is old but it is also free, and I mean really free, no nags whatsoever.
I have big problems with server registrations but since it also affects my hardware desktop phones, I doubt that the problem is with this soft phone being too old.
I checked this thread for soft phone suggestion (for Android or also for my older iPhone6) but since I don’t use phones too much at all (but what can you do LOL), I’d hate to pay for soft. But maybe since you say this Acrobits is one time and has the push notices included, I might consider it.
I never tried that one given its age. There are other free solutions just like it, and more modern like PortSIP UC, MizuDroid, Linphone.
It is not the good thread, but if you have registration problems, maybe you can try SSL (secure) connections. This reduces a lot of potential issues. Maybe the following thread can help:
As for paying for a softphone, I know. I was there too. I do not like to pay for such things. But what changed my mind is (1) the one-time payment, and (2) all other solutions I tried were either not reliable or draining the battery. Since there were quite good reviews for Acrobits/Groundwire, I tried it.
Now I would never go back, and if I had known it before, I might have bought it years ago. I now find myself using my android phone instead of my home phones. I paid a little bit more for Groundwire to have the easy transfer option. (And if you activate the family group of Google Play, up to 5 members can use the application for free too. )
Thank you very much for this excellent tip, this PortSIP UC soft phone is a perfect solution for my more modern mobile phone, my other old phone (also Android) is not supported (Acrobits also is not supported), so I continue using CSIPSimple soft phone on it, it still works.
I have both of these mobile phones registered and calling works.
I tried MizuDroid some time back but didn’t like it, I think because it had adware, this PortSIP UC is completely free of ads . Its not like I grudge people advertising, I just can’t stand having anything moving in sight on screen, like ads that pop up occasionally, even if otherwise they are static. It breaks my concentration on whatever I am doing.
Yes, I was really impressed by the quality of PortSIP UC. I would have used it in place of Zoiper had I knew about it before. This is a nice app.
I must say that I was not totally happy with the display of the Caller ID when a call was coming in. This area needs improvements. (It is not clear enough to see who is calling, the phone number, the name, etc.)
But if a device supports it, the best of them all is Groundwire (Acrobits), period. You have to pay once. (I would never use a pay per month, subscription service for a phone app.)
But among the free ones, PortSIP UC is the one I would go to, based on personal taste.
i’m a (mostly) happy groundwire.app for ios user. probably my biggest beef with it (and, it’s not really their fault, it’s how sms was first designed), is how any kind of slightly complex sms’s just fall apart. can’t be over your character limit (inbound or outbound) (160, which, they should and could easily put a counter in for; i draft in word count.app, and then swing back), you can’t use any fancy characters (for example, smart quotes (double or single) will break a message sending, but straight quotes, won’t; i purposefully write my texts without contractions, for this very reason). what’s kind of worse, is they don’t notify you if it doesn’t go through. i discovered this after some critical messages didn’t make it.
if i was getting greedy, i’d love the messages to sync between multiple devices, but, that’s getting pretty fancy.
I’ll second Acrobit’s Softphone (or the version called Groundwire with SMS) for softphone. Acrobits costs a bit more than other apps but it uses push notification when you have an incoming call so the softphone app on your cellphone doesn’t need to be active all the time consuming battery. Push notification means almost no additional drain on your battery from using the app. The downside is there seems to some lag time for calls to go through Acrobit’s server to the app on your phone and sometimes I don’t answer the call fast enough before it goes to voice mail. But I see the call on the caller ID and either listen to the voice message or call the person back.
For SMS, I like Michael Kourlas’s voip.ms SMS for android, but I realize it’s not available for iOS. It allows for sync of text messages across devices so the whole text conversation appears across all your devices.I tried Groundwire for SMS but text conversations are broken up, sent messages are visible only on the device you sent it on and received messages are visible only on the first device you use to read an incoming message.
I have been using Groundwire for about 4 years now, and it has worked very well. I did have some connection issues and some volume issues, but they all went away when I got a current cellphone.
One of the issues I have not seen raised is the Tech Support that comes with Groundwire. Even though the problems I was having were hardware -related, Gabriel Baker from Acrobits sales@acrobits.cz was there to offer suggestions of what to check.
I will edit my post in this regard (if possible—nope, not possible, this makes too many days already). Thanks!
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. Its not like I grudge people advertising, I just can’t stand having anything moving in sight on screen, like ads that pop up occasionally, even if otherwise they are static. It breaks my concentration on whatever I am doing.
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