Agile Reply review

We review Agile Reply, an iPhone app that reduces the number of taps it takes to send a text message when you can’t answer a call

It used to be that if someone didn’t answer their house phone, we’d just shrug our shoulders in the assumption they weren’t in, weren’t answering, or couldn’t hear the phone. We’d wait an hour or two, and then call again. No big deal.

But these days we expect some kind of immediate - or at least very fast - response whenever we try and get in touch with someone. If we make a call, and all it does is ring, thoughts of accidents, tragedy, outrage and annoyance fill our socially-linked brains. It’s rare we even leave voice messages these days, what with the myriad means we’ve dreamed up of remaining in full contact with the entire world at all times of day and night.

But that doesn’t mean we always want to answer the phone, and if for no other reason, Agile Reply is a great app for stemming the subsequent panic calls, texts and IMs that follow on from an unanswered call.

Should you miss or reject a call, Agile Reply is a simple system for firing back a quick, preset text message to satisfy the caller you haven’t fallen off Snowden or been car-jacked. It comes with several preset categories for different situations, making it fast and easy to get to the message you want to send the caller.

These include messages for when you’re in a meeting, when you’re busy, or when you’re driving. Admittedly, this isn’t the single-tap messenger it claims to be; even when you’re driving there’s a brief moment of law-breaking as you fire up the app, find the correct message and hit send, but it’s certainly no more hassle than actually answering a call hands-free.

Naturally you can input your own custom messages and save them to the app. These can be accessed in exactly the same way, and offer a bit of extra info for your caller since you can tailor the text message responses according to your lifestyle.

There are lots of apps that give you preset text messages, of course, so there’s little so far that really amazes about Agile Reply. But this app has one additional feature that really makes it stand out from the crowd, and maximises its inherent efficiency. The app is able to detect the number and details of your last unanswered call, meaning you don’t need to select any kind of recipient manually unless you choose to.

This cuts out a lot of additional taps, which is the whole point of Agile Reply. All you need to do is choose a message, and it’s fired off to whoever called you last through the iPhone’s native SMS application. This also means your message is entered into the conversation window as if it were any other text, so you get the usual record of back and forth texting.

Simplicity is what Agile Reply is all about, and that’s exactly what it achieves. If you ever find yourself furtively thumbing out the same text messages under the table while at a meeting, or reassuring nervous friends and family that you’ll get in touch as soon as you park up, this is the app for you.

]]>