Best cellphone app that gives you a different cell number

September 5, 2023 10:18 AM

I'm assisting a small non-profit organization. Some of the staff would like to make & receive calls (and text messages) from their cellphones, but they don't want their actual cell numbers revealed. Note that they don't want to simply hide their numbers – they want to use a different number.

I know about Google Voice. We tried it, but it didn't work very well. It introduced a significant lag that caused the two parties to keep interrupting each other.

The VOIP system at the non-profit does have this feature, but licenses for the smartphone app are expensive and are reportedly very buggy.

One person I know recommended MightyCall. Their rates are $15 per user per month. That might be feasible, but I'm also looking for other recommendations that might be better and/or cheaper than MightyCall.

posted by akk2014 to Technology (7 answers total)

I have used Google Voice since its inception as Grand Central, and have never had any issues with call quality, so I would try deleting the old GV number and starting again. If that still is an issue, how about getting an actual different number and a cheap unlimited talk and text plan? Many people, for business separation reasons, carry two cell phones. If their existing cell phones allow for two sims, this could be a convenient solution. Mint Mobile has a $15 per month plan.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:27 AM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Go on the app store and you'll find lots of apps that offer a "second phone line" for free or a few bucks a month. These are mostly voice over IP services though and may not work well with all SMS services (just like Google Voice does not). There is an app called SlyNumber though that claims to give you a real mobile phone number starting at $3 a month through the app. (There's a per-minute cost for outbound calls after the first 100 minutes.) Don't know anything about the app but it seems like what you want and might be worth a try.
posted by kindall at 10:35 AM on September 5, 2023

Google voice has two modes - if the VOIP mode is spotty you can just relay all your calls through the Google voice service. What means is that on incoming calls on google voice number just forwards the call on to my number, which is kept private. This can be setup entirely online. For outgoing calls I can initiate those in the google voice app and it will then provide a google voice number to call and use to relay my call, again keeping my number private. Google voice can handle some other rudimentary scenarios like sent to voice mail, but my needs aren't that complicated.

The call relay is using your regular cell voice service to actually make the calls so the quality of service is identical to your cell providers cell service and I have found that it almost never introduces additional lag.
posted by zenon at 11:24 AM on September 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've been reasonably happy with Sideline. It is drastically less laggy than Google Voice (which I use sometimes for SMS and voicemail, but is just not very good at voice calls.)
posted by toxic at 4:45 PM on September 5, 2023

The Hushed app.
posted by virve at 8:23 PM on September 5, 2023

Yeah, just chiming in to say that the Google voice lag was probably internet issues, and if you choose option connected to your cell service it should be better.
posted by bearette at 9:19 AM on September 6, 2023

Burner and/or RingCentral. If you have a whole group, RingCentral is probably best.
posted by kschang at 5:01 PM on September 6, 2023