Goin’ Mobile: VoxOx Launches iPhone App with International Calling Feature

San Diego-based VoxOx, which provides a free communications service based on voice over Internet (VoIP) technology, hopes to make a big splash today with the release of its VoxOx Call for iPhone—the startup’s first mobile app.

When VoxOx debuted three years ago, users could download a free application to their desktop, enabling consumers to combine their voice, text messaging, social media, chat, email, fax, and content sharing into a unified service with a single user interface. VoxOx has added some new features since then, such as a low-cost technique for placing international calls and a “translator in the cloud” for translating things like text messages and emails. The company introduced a fully redesigned version of its desktop software in January at the Consumer Electronics Show that was intended to simplify its user interface and main messaging window.

Now, with the launch of its iPhone app, VoxOx is looking to capitalize on the “call connect” feature of its VoIP service to enable iPhone users to make low-cost long-distance calls from anywhere in the world. As I explained last year, the technology uses SMS (text messaging) technology to access an automated, cloud-based system that connects the caller and receiver without incurring international charges for placing the call.

VoxOx boasts that its mobile app does the same thing—without drawing heavily on a user’s mobile data plan—and includes a digital recording and transcription service, two-way worldwide text messaging, automated call forwarding, and other features.

The iPhone market has become so huge that it’s kind of a no-brainer for telephony companies to address the iOS market sooner or later. Because the iOS accounts for something like 16 percent of the smartphone operating system market and close to 60 percent of mobile web consumption in North America, it’s something that VoxOx needs to do to stay relevant. It’s also not the only mobile app that VoxOx has in the works.

“We will definitely have something new for our Android users; we just don’t have one today,” says Matt Howell, the VoxOx director of product management.

VoxOx is operated by San Diego’s Telcentris, which apparently altered its name from TelCentris last year, as a free service for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.