Originally Posted by
gfunkdave
My point is that it's not a best practice because anyone who thinks to "text Gfunk" will type in my phone number and not my email address. It would be fine for people who are replying to an existing conversation but not for people starting a new one.
Sure. To your point, it's possible anybody within a conversation already using the iMessage protocol might fail to send and offer to switch to SMS. So yeah, there's always that. But at least the sender will see the failure. (with the t-mo digits app, you'll get SMS inside that app as well, if they are sent as SMS).
For me, it's still what I consider a good idea to use your Apple ID to initiate new conversations in the Messages app, but I certainly concede that's not necessarily going to solve every problem for you if you can't keep your main number active without paying for a data pass with your carrier. At least with the dual SIM and my carrier I really have no use for the virtual number app anymore since I don't seem to have that data pass problem. I can just keep both lines active without worrying about paying for extra data.
-David