Former Googlers Maneesh Arora and Amit Sangani spent the better part of their careers working on the likes of the now-defunct Google Health, Adsense, and Adwords platforms while under Google’s employ. After leaving the Goog, these two engineers teamed up to develop MightyText, which they commonly describe as an application that combines Gmail and iMessage into a powerful messaging client for Android users.
“To me, it makes no sense that I have to have my phone in front of me to communicate … If I leave it in another room, or in the car, or at home, I essentially have to retrieve it to see who’s calling or to receive incoming texts.” – Maneesh Arora, Mighty Text co-founder
The aim of MightyText is simple; users install an application on their Android device which grants permissions to your SMS/MMS messages so that you can view and reply to messages on your PC or Mac. You can also use the web interface to have your phone place a call to any number, helpful when you’d rather call to talk something out than respond to a text message. This could be extremely helpful for those times where you leave your phone at home, or if your device is in another room and you don’t want to interrupt what you’re doing to go get it.
This is strikingly similar to an upcoming feature in OSX Mountain Lion, which connects to iMessage to allow OSX users to read and respond to SMS and MMS message from their Mac computers.
MightyText has been around as a beta since August, and its functions were limited in use due to requiring a Google Chrome extension in order to function. Today, the use case for MightyText has expanded greatly with the introduction of a web-based application that opens the service up to any browser. Imagine being able to read and respond to text messages from your iPad or Mac device (a platform where, frankly, Chrome OS really stinks).
One of the biggest advantages is not needing to take out your smartphone to send or receive messages, which is often frowned upon in schools and workplaces. Now, users can send and receive text messages from a laptop, desktop, or tablet computer without needing to pull out their phone and risk a teacher or some Johnny-Too-Good co-worker calling them out for violating standard policies.
If you own an Android device, you simply owe it to yourself to give MightyText a download. Head over to MightyText’s main webpage to get started, and let us know how you’re enjoying MightyText in the comments.
[via MightyText, TechCrunch]