This is awesome! I remember seeing the comment from coldsauce and your comment a while ago. How fast do websites load over SMS with this app? It's obviously slower than a 3G connection, but do you have any idea in terms of bytes/sec or kbps?
Thanks for the praise, I know it's not a super huge scale project but it was a good challenge to develop. As far as speed goes, I'm not exactly sure. I know that Twilio's toll free numbers send about 5 SMS messages a second, so once many users use the app at once it would slow down significantly. One thing I'm working on is decentralizing the app so that a Server Android app could be run on a phone that has an internet connection, using that phone's phone number as a way to send pages. About speed, I just ran a test and checked google.com's file size (it's 112 bytes) and timed the page request, upon the first text arriving it only took 4.5 seconds to load. That's a staggering 40kbps! Pretty impressive as a best case scenario, but a bunch of factors will probably make the average a bit lower.
Just realized I had a brain fart, there's no way that those kind of speeds would be possible! I meant to say 25 bytes per second. Very slow compared to any mobile network, but better than not having any internet access at all.
Yet again, I really ought to pay more attention to my results! I was looking at the website https://example.com, which does only total 112 bytes. But https://google.com is actually 3.42kb! That means the actual effective speed is 0.76 kilobytes/second, or about 6 kilobits/sec. A lot faster than I expected!