Announcing the OpenVBX iPhone App for Users on the Go

Announcing the OpenVBX iPhone App for Users on the Go

Use OpenVBX for the iPhone to enjoy the same great features as the web app, on the go! Listen to voice mail across all your inboxes, assign message to your coworkers, and return calls and texts directly from the app using your company’s phone number, not your cell number.

Open Source

We’ve open sourced the OpenVBX iPhone app (see source on Github) so you can download, hack and customize it to suit your needs, just like the web application.  There are also a few cool tricks (see below) that we added to integrate the mobile app with the web and email… if you dig those, make sure to check out the source.

Some Cool Extras! 

The OpenVBX iPhone app is available for free in the Apple appstore today, so there’s no need to compile and submit it to the app store yourself.  The first time you install the OpenVBX iPhone app, you’re asked to provide the URL of your OpenVBX installation, so you can wire up the free app to any OpenVBX installation.

But since that could be confusing for end-users, we’ve let you send the app and provisioning data directly to the phone from inside OpenVBX.  Using this feature, the mobile app will configure itself… cool!

We’ve also built in protocol handlers to the mobile app that coordinate with the web app.  What the heck does this mean?  When you click a link to OpenVBX in a notification email, the web app will detect if it’s an iPhone and if the mobile app is installed.  If so, the user is redirected to the mobile app for a native experience.  We thought that was awesome.

New to OpenVBX?

We like to think of OpenVBX as Google Voice for business, empowering you to purchase phone numbers, create an automated voice attendant to answer and route calls, and provide an information hot-line when your business is closed. You can go much further with this when you check out the code and modify it for your own purposes, or build plugins to extend its functionality.

Members of the OpenVBX developer community have customized the web app to serve all sorts of industries and use cases from yoga studios to hospitals, restaurants to software consulting businesses.  Because the new OpenVBX iPhone app is also open source, we can’t wait for you to customize the iPhone App and make it your own!

Upgrade Your OpenVBX to the 2010 API Version

We’re also excited that we’ve released a new version of OpenVBX, which has been upgraded to the most current version of the the Twilio API (check out the 2010 API version changelog), fixes a number of bugs and enables new features for the iPhone app.  You will need to be running OpenVBX with the 2010 Twilio API to use the iPhone application.

To upgrade your installation of OpenVBX, download the newest version and run the easy upgrade script (http://your-installation-url/upgrade).