Prior to the smartphone boom, international texting was a perilous task with phone bills easily spiraling out of control. Sending international text messages (SMS) can still incur huge costs if you aren’t careful. So to stay in touch with friends and family in other countries without emptying your bank account, there are a few things to take into consideration.

Although most individual carriers will offer international texting plans, using apps for international texting can save a lot of money - particularly when you have lots of family members using texts as a primary mode of communication!

International Texting for iPhone

Check out the article on texting via iPhone free of charge, even across international borders. The iMessage feature really is worth mastering.

Additionally, who hasn’t heard of WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger App? These apps have become so ubiquitous in the market that you can be pretty sure most of your contacts have at least one of them.  That’s great, because messages can be sent free to other users, provided they have:

-       The same app installed

-       An internet connection

Other free international texting apps often have multiple deficiencies, such as lack of support for mass texting, no way to send pictures in messaging (such as Google Voice) or can send only as a link, requiring the recipient to have a data plan (example: TextPlus), no way to quickly convert from text to a call, and no ability to access contacts directly from the messaging program (TextPlus again). 

So smartphones and the internet have really helped us to cut down on astronomical costs.  Here’s the thing though….What about our friends and relatives who don’t have an internet connection? Then we need a solution for ‘old school’ SMS/texting right?...

All iPhone International Texting Apps are not Equal

While many of the apps being offered are either non-genuine texting apps (such as chat programs that force you to use your data plan, or forwarding services that make their use clumsy and inefficient), there is one app that provides fast, easy international texting without incurring hefty charges from your carrier.

Rebtel SMS can save up to 65% when it comes to texting friends and family in other countries. Rebtel works differently than most international texting apps; instead of texting directly to the international contact and incurring a high charge, texts are sent to a local number, so you don’t have to pay your mobile carrier’s high international texting rates.  That’s the technical side of it anyway, but let Rebtel worry about that.  All you need to know is that texting is possible over long distances – and cheaply too!