We use VoIP services to power our business, so we tried out the iPlum App for Android and here’s our experience. Overall, we weren’t very happy with it, but it shows promise and if it works well on your phone it can be a decent choice.
Pricing: 3/5
The pricing for iPlum is great, and that’s about all we can say. The price per minute is competitive. Unlike many other virtual phone number providers which have a minimum $5 or $10 per month fee, you just pay for what you use at iPlum. For many startups and small businesses, they wouldn’t even use $10 a month in minutes or need unlimited minutes.
The only downside on pricing was that it cost $20 to port your number out to another service. That feels more like being held hostage than a reasonable fee to cover their costs. Other providers we’ve used charged nothing or at most $5. They were kind enough to refund this when we had troubles with the app.
Bugs & Support = 2/5
The app just plain didn’t work on our Android OnePlus One we tested it on running Lineage OS and stock. Sometimes after 5 minutes, sometimes after an hour, but always eventually, the app would just “time out”. It couldn’t send or receive any new texts or calls until we force quit it or restarted the phone. Other VoIP apps worked fine so it was something with iPlum specifically. We provided detailed debug information to their support team and waited a week for a fix with no luck. Also, scrolling in the SMS area was almost totally broken. Sometimes it would jump pages of text when dragging a line or two in any direction.
Features & Privacy = 3/5
The app can text and call from a second line over wifi or a data connection and it supports MMS which is not that common among their competitors. It provides no feature to import/export your SMS messages, which can be a problem for businesses that need to prove what happened in a conversation with a client.
The app is constantly sending analytics back to a Russian analytics provider, but scarier still, it requests root access! Why does a VoIP app need root? We asked iPlum but they didn’t tell us.