Love downloading free iPhone apps? Here’s a way to get notified either by email or sms when a paid app is available for free.

I absolutely love downloading free iPhone apps (who doesn’t). But it’s hard to keep tab of which app goes free and when. By using Google and Feed My Inbox, you can get SMS or email alerts when an app is available for free.

Google SMS: This service has currently been made available only for Indian mobile subscribers and is still a Labs feature. So we might not really know whether this will be around few months from now. Until then, Indian users can subscribe to this SMS channel. Around 3-4 SMS are sent each day, depending upon the number of apps that become free and also the number of SMS you’ve limited Google sending you.

Feed My Inbox: This is actually an RSS-to-Email service that sends you any feed as an email. You can use this feed created by our friends at KRAPPS (based on App Shopper).

Good ol’ RSS: If you don’t want to mess up your inbox and want to know when an app goes free the good old RSS way, use this link.

Quick Links:
Google SMS Channel
RSS Feed (for both RSS readers and Email subscribers)

Twitter sends out SMS alerts every time you receive a direct message or a nudge, provided you have chosen to receive such messages. However, Twitter does not send you messages each time you get a reply. When using services such as Vakow! to post messages on Twitter, it would help if you were able to get those replies to you via SMS as well. That’s where we at Harmless Geek come in. =)

If you have activated your mobile number with Twitter, then skip to the next paragraph. Else, head over to your Twitter devices page and activate your mobile number now.

Provided you have five minutes to spare, this tutorial should be pretty easy and straight-forward. Follow the steps:

1. Setup another Twitter account. Try to have a short username for this account, even if it doesn’t make any sense. This account is only for you and for the purpose of receiving @replies. For the purpose of keeping the public timeline clean, make this account “private”.
2. Create an account on Twitterfeed or any similar service.
3. In the following URL, change username to your Twitter username (handle). Also change username2 to the second Twitter account you created at step1.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=username+-username2&show_user=true

4. It should look something like this, where 9_6 is my primary Twitter handle, and santoshgs is the second account I created.

   http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=9_6+-santoshgs&show_user=true

5. Now copy that URL and head over to the Twitterfeed account you created on step 2. Create a new feed with the login details of the second Twitter account, and use the URL we previously created. Include just the title or the description, but not both. Keep the update frequency to a minimum. It should look something similar to the following photo. What we have completed till now is making Twitterfeed post the search feed for your username to your second Twitter account.

   

6. All that remains now is that you follow your second account and activate device updates. (Pardon the username in the following crude image. It should actually be your second account handle.)

   

That’s it. You’re done. Now get @replies SMSed to you wherever you are! Remember, you read this FIRST on Harmless Geek.