An App Platform for Dumb Phones (opens in new tab)

I like the idea.

Note that if there is a lot of text traffic on a given number, carriers like AT&T, Verizon, et al will block texts to and from that number until the traffic subsides. What's worse is that if you send a message to that number from the Twilio dashboard, its status will be "sent," but you will not actually receive it. Apparently in the world of SMS, "sent" simply means the message has been delivered to the destination carrier, and it is not a delivery receipt like with iMessage or BBM.

Twilio suggests that, to reduce this risk, you load balance across a collection of such numbers, or purchase a short code, which isn't cheap: http://www.twilio.com/sms/shortcodes

If you want to see what this would look like if it was a real business, checkout http://www.dotgo.com and http://dotgo.com/Support/Documentation/.

DOTGO solves the problem of service discoverability by mapping domain names to shortcodes representing TLDs. Want wikipedia.org? Text "wikipedia" to DOTORG (368674). Want to checkin to Foursquare? Text "foursquare" to DOTCOM (368266).

DOTGO also provides a language of reusable components, known as CMRL (Concise Message Routing Language), it allows you to create hierarchical menus, links and URL callbacks.

They're available in the United States and select countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Previously, I was a web application developer for them, I still think it's a great idea and recommend you guys give it a go.

Slightly off topic, are there actually any good (i.e. recommendable) dumb phones? It has been an interesting market to try to navigate and research.

A very similar concept has been around in India - http://55444.in/

Don't forget that anyone can write a dumb app! Just fork the repository, add your app, and take out a pull request!

https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/

Cool idea - but how is it being paid for? By the looks of things, it's using Twilio - but that'll get expensive if this becomes popular.

Seems extremely similar to what Intuit has been building in India: Txtweb[1]. The apps support two modes PUSH and PULL. The most common is PULL, where you SMS to some number something like "@appname.optionalExtension <stuff that will be passed on to the application logic", response comes back as SMS. Their experimental PUSH automatically pushes subscribed users with SMSes. I had developed an app, @news a couple of years ago and still see decent traffic on it. The developers are also quite friendly and responsive. If you are interested in a similar platform but in a market that is benefitted from this application a lot more, you should definitely check them out.

[1] http://www.txtweb.com/

I've thought about how you could probably get Siri to use SMS as an API to tons of services, like opentable, fandango, etc, etc - this seems to be a great step in that direction - which is actually the opposite of dumb, but instead seems uber smart.

I like the idea, it might be a nice replacement in the wake of the Google SMS shutdown. One quick thing: You might want to make app names case insensitive. My phone automatically capitalized Ltrain, resulting in a message stating the app was not found, however when I manually changed it to ltrain it worked. Maybe simple spelling correcting for app names (e.g. off by a letter or a letter is missing) could be added too?

Don't like the interface (makes it seem 100x more complicated than it is) but love the idea. I often hit my data cap, am in an area with slow or no data coverage or don't want to load up an app and would be happy to shoot a text off to get a piece of info.

I'm in the UK but this is a far bigger problem in other countries so if executed better this would be very interesting.

Neat idea. I might recommend allowing at least the first letter (of the app) to be case-insensitive though, since lots of things auto-capitalize. Also I'm not having much luck with 'dir', and some error messages or something would help, but meh - the concept is great!

I did an app for rolling dice

https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/pull/15

ex:

    roll 1d20+4

    =21 | rolled 17 plus 4 for a total of 21.

Just wrote up an app called Rick Roulette. It's like Russian Roulette, but with Rick Astley instead of bullets: https://github.com/dumbstore/dumbstore/pull/13

Similar services already exist in India and are gaining quite a lot of popularity among users. http://txtweb.com http://55444.in

This is really awesome. Back when I was helping work on Pingie (an rss->sms service), I put some of this functionality into it (weather reports, stock quotes, traffic reports).

Good luck with this!

Saw this at the ITP show, will be adding some Twilio apps

I knew my phone would be valuable some day!

This is exactly what companies were doing in the .com bubble of early 2000's! SMS "games" and services.

for all the technology and cool applications we have today, we can't forget that accessibility is still a key issue. dumbstore FTW.