No. It’s not what you’re thinking. Textie isn’t some sexting app that lets you choose people at random to send dirty little ditties to.

No, Textie is better. It is the latest app from Atebits, the one-man dev team behind Tweetie and Borange. Their goal was to make texting cheaper, and simple again. Companies in North America gauge their clients with huge cell phone bills, and a disproportionate number are on exorbitantly-priced texting plans that, in reality, don’t cost the carriers any money to maintain. They function on the easy-to-maintain analog networks that exist below the digital 2G and 3G networks, and cost fractions of pennies to administer.

The latest statistics in Canada are staggering: we send over 174 million text messages per day in this country¹. That is up from 174 million per year in 2002. I don’t know exactly why texting has taken over as voice communication as many peoples’ main form of communication, but since it’s fast, easy and fairly non-committal (you don’t have to reply right away, or ever), the SMS is the new king of the word.

Textie, released on Thursday, tries to solve the issue of expensive SMS plans. It uses email addresses globally, and in the United States, cell phone numbers, to communicate between people. If someone has registered his or her email address or phone number with Textie, the message will go right through into the app itself (the app supports pop-up notifications). If not, the text comes through as an email or incoming text message. When this person replies, via email or SMS, it will come back into the app on your end, saving yourself outgoing and incoming texting charges.

Simply, the app is great. The messages go through quickly, and the conversations are spread out and threaded like the native iPhone Messaging app. You can also send photos through the service, and they appear either in the app itself or as an email attachment (currently, the app does not support MMS). I have found the app to be reliable and, being ad-supported, will inevitably become a very popular app.

There are other cheap texting apps available: TextNow, GroupText, TextPlus. But they excel in group texting. There are also WhatsApp, Kik and Ping!, which aim to be messenger replacements. I think with the popularity of Tweetie (and the publicity garnered from Textie being from the same developer) Textie will likely find a lot more momentum to hit the ground running. It is possible to remove the in-app ads for a one-time fee of $1.99, but as you can see above, the ads are not intrusive.

I highly recommend this app, and hope to see it adopted by more people, so I can remove my text plan altogether.

Look into it on the iTunes App Store.