Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed

Hello all,

This is my second year of working on a project[1] with the goal of browsing the web, on an Android smartphone, without reliance on Wi-Fi or mobile data. While this concept might seem aimless, my goal was to provide a way for people in areas with limited, expensive, or censored cellular internet access a way to view the web in a basic format. I finished work on a basic client-server model last year[2], and this year, I implemented a new pseudo-distributed peer-to-peer model that allows any TxtNet Browser user to use their own smartphone to run a background server service that communicates via the user's own primary mobile number. The main advantage to this model over last year's use of the Twilio API is the fact that with an unlimited SMS plan from a consumer carrier, you will likely end up paying significantly less than the amount you would pay for Twilio credits (averaging about ~$0.50 per website). There's a lot going on with the stateless nature of SMS, GSM-7 encoding, and Brotli compression, so please ask any questions you might have!

I've also started up a test server instance running on a +1 country code phone number, so feel free to test out the app with your own smartphone. Like mentioned in the GitHub repo, please be aware that I (necessarily) have access to every phone number and associated request that is sent. Of course, anyone can host their own server instance, and if you would like to share it, feel free to get in touch so I can add the number to the repo! Also, there are likely many bugs still lurking, so feel free to report those.

[1] https://github.com/lukeaschenbrenner/TxtNet-Browser/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905496

Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed
github.com

Very cool - I've often thought about trying to set something up like this for situations - mostly on airplanes - where you're allowed some kind of "free messaging" but otherwise don't have any data.

Maybe it is a shame that WAP usage died off as you could probably get the essential information from a site with very few bytes. Combined with something like this it would be great for getting stuff done.

Opera Mini does this, but IIRC it's not self-hostable.

Thanks! And yep, my goal was to make it as easy as possible to host a server without any technical knowledge. I haven't looked into the subject extensively, but I believe those services exist(ed) in the form of Opera Mini and UC Browser. IIRC, Opera Mini's Android app still supports this. Sadly, it's not open source, so you have to trust Opera with all your data, and Opera hasn't exactly had the best track record... I doubt UC Browser is any better in that regard. I used both about 10 years ago when they still had J2ME versions of their apps... It was kind of surreal to use Opera Mini's on a touchscreen dumbphone because they had updated their midlet to look very similar to the iOS 7 version, on a much much inferior device! It worked surprisingly well, compressing text and images.