Twilio review

Twilio is the largest CPaaS in the world and it does not sell an iMessage API. What it does sell is Apple Messages for Business, which is Apple's official, sanctioned business messaging channel — a grey bubble with your verified brand name and logo, entered from Maps, Safari, Search or your own site. That is a genuinely different product from the blue-bubble services this site otherwise covers, and for some buyers it is the correct one.

What it is good at

• +Officially sanctioned by Apple. No terms-of-service grey area at all.
• +Verified brand name, logo and a trusted entry point from Maps and Safari.
• +Apple Pay checkout, list pickers and other rich interactive elements the blue-bubble vendors cannot offer.
• +Enterprise compliance posture, SLAs and support that no specialist iMessage vendor can match.
• +One vendor for SMS, MMS, RCS, WhatsApp and voice alongside it.

Where it will bite you

• −**It is not a blue bubble.** If you came here for person-to-person iMessage, this is the wrong product.
• −The customer must start the conversation. You cannot cold-message someone.
• −Apple's approval process is slow and not aimed at small businesses.
• −Reads as a corporate channel, which is precisely the opposite of the effect a local business usually wants.

What Twilio claims

Reported as the vendor's own marketing claims. We have not independently reproduced these numbers, and neither should you treat them as benchmarks.

• “Orchestrate native entry points into a single, branded thread

The shape of the API

Illustrative — parameter names and endpoints change. Treat this as the flavour of the integration, and copy the real thing from the official docs.

# Note the channel: this is Apple Messages for Business, not iMessage.
# You can only send within a conversation the customer already started.
curl -X POST "https://conversations.twilio.com/v1/Conversations/$CONVERSATION_SID/Messages" \
  -u "$TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID:$TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN" \
  --data-urlencode "Body=Your order has shipped: https://acme.co/o/551?utm_source=apple_business&utm_medium=messaging&utm_campaign=shipped"

Tracking links with Twilio

Whatever you send with, build the URL from one helper so tagging is consistent across every job and campaign. Open the UTM builder to generate one now.