Adding additional Phone numbers for SMS

how do you add additional numbers for sms messages i could enter my number bud want to have my wife get same sms messages i do.

At the moment, only a single primary number is supported for SMS notifications. A common workaround is to use Pushbullet to support multiple notification targets.

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What’s your timing and action plan for the “hit list”?

@Tod_Claytor welcome to the community and thanks for posting!

Community feedback is a key part of how we plan and prioritize what we work on next. The more feedback we see around a particular feature request or enhancement, the more likely it is to get prioritized. So adding your comment to this post is a good first step!

As you may have noticed, this particular request hasn’t had a ton of traction yet, so we’ve prioritized other highly requested features and you can see the result of those requests in the Announcements Category.


Alternative Approaches

That being said, there are a few common approaches that are taken to notify multiple recipients.

Pushbullet and Pushover are both popular alternatives for delivering notifications.

  • Pushbullet supports up to 500 messages a month for free and has apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Windows, etc.
  • Pushover charges a one-time $5 fee per platform (eg. $5 for Android, $5 for iOS) and supports 7,500 messages a month.
  • Both of these support targeting multiple different devices and with Pushover, you can easily share your ‘user key’ across family member’s devices

Alternatively, our Twilio SMS integration is not limited to a single recipients device, but requires you to have a paid Twilio account.

I’ve tried to setup Pushbullet, but it doesn’t exist in the iOS App Store.

An alternative solution for me would be to edit - or even delete - the current phone number for SMS. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

Wow! It looks like PushBullet was unpublished from the App Store. The developer has responded to a few posts on Reddit explaining.

Pushover is certainly still an option, but there is a one-time fee of $5.

If you send a message to support, we can help you with changing the SMS number on file.

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Josh - please ignore previous PM regarding changing SMS number. I’ve installed Pushover and all is well,

Thanks.

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I agree that we should be able to send an SMS to more than one phone number. Many families have additional family members (e.g. spouses) who should also be informed when there’s something worth informing about. I understand that “you can further complicate your solution by adding in another tool to accomplish this” but ideally we shouldn’t have to do that for such a common need.

Maybe where one adds an SMS in the Rules Engine if there was a “how to add a second phone number” if there was a pointer to the information above (work arounds) and a pointer to this ‘voting ability’ more people would push for this.

Consider this my vote. Hopefully this capability will get added to this great tool before too long. Thanks!

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Thanks for the feedback - make sure to scroll up to the top of the post and cast a vote. :slight_smile:

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Done, thanks! I’m getting smarter about this stuff every day. But I obviously have a LONG way to go.

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Josh, on further reflection I’ve removed my vote.

I think using Pushover is likely the way to go. I’m now using that to push notifications to my iPad, iPhone, desktop browser, and well as the devices of my wife. Having a tool specifically designed to do this, including all of the various permutations of HOW people want this to happen, does make good sense.

Thanks again,

Scott

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A post was split to a new topic: Pushover Delivery Groups

Are we now able to add a second SMS?

No. When a Feature Request is closed out, we’ll reply to the thread linking to the release post.

See my reply above with some alternative approaches:

New to Pushbullet (and SharpTools.)

I need to send text notifications from SharpTools routines to multiple phones. I have a single Pushbullet account setup (using my GMail), with the app on two Galaxy phones.

When I login to Pushbullet on my PC, I see both phones under Devices. When SharpTools sends out a notification to both phones, the browser on my PC shows the notification sent to both phones. But only one of the phones actually receives the notification.

I’m not sure why this isn’t working, or where to look to troubleshoot. Hoping I’m missing something simple, as it’s really simple to send messages to multiple phones via WebCoRE…

Appreciate any help…

Can you share some screenshots of what you’re seeing and how you have things configured?

Keep in mind that the Pushbullet action in SharpTools rules send the notification to a single device that you’ve selected. You would need to add multiple Pushbullet actions if you wanted to send to multiple targets. (Pushover, on the other hand, allows sending to multiple devices in a single action)

You said that you can see both devices on the PC – do you see both devices in the drop-down list within the Pushbullet action in SharpTools rules? From your PC, manually send a message to each device and make sure you receive it.

So, from the Pushbullet screen, it appears the text is sent to both phones, but only one phone (Dave’s) actually receives the text.

The android Pushbullet app is installed on both phones, using the same Pushbullet credentials.

Idk if I have some setting incorrect on the second phone?

Thanks…

@dave.blackwell can you try to modify the title and message in the 2nd message so they are slightly different from the 1st one? From my quick tests, I was able to reproduce the same issue if I send the exact same message to both devices, but both devices received the notifications if I change the message a bit. Not sure if there’s something at the Pushbullet side that preventing the same message from being sent to multiple devices within a short period.

I was able to receive the notifications on both devices in the following setting.

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Sure enough! When I change the BODY to be unique, it works. Pushbullet notifications appear on each of the 2 phones.

Wow, frustrating! Wish I could just simply text a single notification to 2 cell phone numbers!

Thanks! Appreciate your help!

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You might also give Pushover a try if you want easier configuration for sending the same notification to multiple devices at once. The UI in SharpTools allows you to check the box next to multiple devices at once – or you can use a ‘group key’ to always send to certain group of devices.

It’s a one-time fee of $5 per platform (eg. Android / iOS) and you can use it on multiple devices of the same OS type. I’m pretty sure it comes with a trial per OS, but it’s been a while since I first tested it.

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