11–20 of 158 posts
> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.
IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"
But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.
There's some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile/cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).
This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…
If the phone numbers were of your users you were presumably unauthorized to sign up for a different service using those. That is sketchy.
This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive. At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter's API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had "dummy" accounts…
Author’s claims are valid. SMS is still relied upon in countries without stable internet connection. Twitter should use its resources to fix the vulnerabilities and not just kill it off. Seems like they are straying away from their mission of allowing everyone to create and share ideas without barriers.
Mobile twitter works fine with 2G connections and the right settings.
> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.
IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"