I came to the requirement to send SMS from my django app. Its a dashboard from multiple clients, and each client will have the ability to send programable SMS. 
Is this achievable with django smsish? I have found some packages that aren't updated, and I sending email sms is not possible.
All answers found are old and I have tried all approaches suggested.
Do I have to use services like twilio mandatorily? Thanks
Using Twilio is not mandatory, but I do recommend it. Twilio does the heavy lifting, your Django App just needs to make the proper API Requests to Twilio, which has great documentation on it. 
Twilio has Webhooks as well which you can 'hook' to specific Django Views and process certain events. As for the 'programmable' aspect of your app you can use django-celery, django-cron, RabbitMQ or other task-queueing software.
Sending SMS from django app