Messaging Android on a Mac

[jayducharme]

I recently purchased a Mac mini for our church office to replace their ancient PC. I thought one of the benefits would be the ability to send messages to contacts directly from the Mac. But that only works for contacts who have an Apple ID. Any other contacts can't be messaged. I know about the trick of checking off message forwarding on an iPhone. But the problem is that the church doesn't have an iPhone. Does anyone know a workaround for this? If not, do you think Apple's adoption of RCS later this year will fix that issue?

 

[MikeDr206]

This isn’t correct. So long as *you* have an iPhone, you can use your Mac to send text messages to non-iPhone numbers.

Both your Mac and iPhone have to be signed into the same Apple ID. And on your iPhone, you have to enable your Mac under “text message forwarding” in settings, which “allow these devices to send and receive text messages from this iPhone.”

Your iPhone doesn’t have to be nearby… everything gets synced over the cloud I believe.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102545

 

[Tica011]

And if you have an Android phone, you can pair the phone with your browser (I used it only on Chrome) by going to messages.google.com, pair scanning QR code, and then send SMS from the browser via Android phone

How To Send And Receive Texts From An Android Phone On Mac - SlashGear

Do you own a Mac computer and an Android smartphone? They may not have a seamless integration, but you can link the devices to send and receive texts on macOS.

www.slashgear.com

 

[gilby101]

You need a phone (iPhone or Android) associated with the Mac and its Apple ID. This is because: 1) nearly all messaging falls back SMS text, and 2) phone number is a form of validation/authorisation as a sender.

As an alternative you could use one of the text messaging web sites to send SMS messages. Some are free, but if you want replies you will need to subscribe to a service. Someone may have a recommendation for a good one in your country.

Facebook Messenger, perhaps?