Every night the platform would kick off a process to claim money from the telco using some key which was tied to an SMS the user had sent.
That process was responsible for more than $1 million a month, but it was buggy as hell.
Half of the billing attempts would fail, the retry logic was buggy, processes would crash so you would just start them again without proper semantics to ensure you don’t bill people twice.
After a while there were so many retries outstanding that you couldn’t get through them overnight, so we would try in random orders and we would have the process running from 3 days ago whilst try close off today’s bills.
I’m sure people were billed incorrectly and a lot of money was left on the table from users who should have been billed. We never really heard a lot of noise about this either.
So I’m sympathetic to this process and glad that Apple and Google have improved the confidence around mobile commerce.