I update my own site/blog/journal with a sms-only service I set up: https://textpost.me
wow! Can I send text from India?
Hmm. No idea, actually. Incoming texts run through Twilio.
Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
91–100 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#92I'm pretty skeptical that there's any area in the world with reliable SMS and no mobile data, not even GPRS.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#93there is no such thing as unlimited, you will still have a bandwidth cap or "responsible use policy" which your IP-to-SMS protocol will easily overflow. I believe translating even a basic set of http request responses into and from IP/SMS will cause lots of SMS jam. but interesting proposition nevertheless :)
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#94FYI, Iridium Go plans include an unlimited data plan. Very slow, but people have actually used ssh over it. With this you’d actually be able to achieve your use case goals.
This is the right answer. Prefixed with a "No, SMS won't work for that in 2022."
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn’t that blow up your phone? I could cat a million line file and it would take some time before I could do the equivalent of ctrl-c or close session.
The agent running on the remote machine would need to be aware of this issue and filter out long responses.
Yes, for example, just update the screen no more than once every few seconds. With no compression you can send chained 153 ascii character messages is only 13-14 SMS messages. With any compression, I suspect you could get refresh rates for most commands in less than a second in response to reasonable commands. Unreasonable command responses you could simply ^C or otherwise terminate the script.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#96What you want if your comms layer supports it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser... It works on dumb phones and is extremely lightweight. Think of it as connection based SMS. Very popular in places with low connectivity.
You can’t use it for your own applications willy nilly, though. You have to talk to the sms center of your comms operator, and that comes with costs and infrastructure to set up.
Yes, this is similar to having an application server hookup from the Videotext days, or for a more recent example, to have a point-of-presence in someone else's datacenter.
I'm not sure if there are gateways to the internet available for the server side, that would seem to be a logical development.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#97I'm pretty skeptical that there's any area in the world with reliable SMS and no mobile data, not even GPRS.
Maybe they just can't afford data in their location, but can afford SMS (or are on somebody else's plan etc)
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#98capsule does a great job with SMS based UI, my girl doesn't even have the app on her phone just texts with them
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#99If you are lucky they support wap, https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/wireless-application-protocol/
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#100For what it's worth, I built a service that allows you to use Google Maps and a dictionary over SMS: https://gistsms.com
I've stopped working on the project but would be curious to hear if there's still interest!