Does anyone have a better source of information than this one forum comment from someone who thinks scanning a QR code is enough to get your phone to send a text message?
EDIT: It’s just an SMS URI. It doesn’t automatically send anything, just opens a text message for you to send.
This is just the old phone number verification with a QR code convenience method.
It’s not something specific to a phone. It’s just a convenient method to enter your phone number.
So if there are any costs for sending this SMS it’s on you.
It's a $0/month e-mail service.
If the price of entry is a single text message, I think that's fair.
there shouldn’t be any remaining for the consumer today
unless you’re a real unfortunate soul.
There weren’t any infrastructure costs to sending the first SMS ever,
Infrastructure costs were marginal, near 0,
because SMS was just 140 bytes of text stuffed into already-occurring network traffic
between phone<->telco.
the VZ guys laughed and said it cost less than a penny for every 1M SMS.
Continuing that behavior until everybody’s grandma had iMessage, is a large portion of why I don’t trust a telco!
(Not building out the full range of rural etc network they promised to, while cashing all of the government subsidies, struck me wrong as well.)
Furthermore, carriers still charge each other for exchanging SMS traffic, though many of them just charge the difference rather than sending each other bills.
This approach is quite costly if you're out of the country, though. Sending an SMS is hit and miss when roaming in foreign enough networks, and each SMS can cost you a significant amount for exchanging 10 characters. Even receiving SMS messages far away from home can cost you money, which is a pain if you have a relative that could never get used to modern messaging services.
PS Has the bio trap snared any robots yet?!
So many companies - such as electric car charging stations - require this without considering failure modes and alternative workflows.
Also try squeezing the phone at various points to see if it pops the internal connector back in. You can find a repair video to see where the connector is.
I wonder if I could find a camera app that lets me select a different camera at app startup. The built in app closes with an error, unless I long click it and select "Take a selfie".
Ha, it worked! After opening in selfie mode, I can select manual mode in the stock camera app and use a different rear camera. But if I accidentally use the wrong settings, the whole app closes with an error.
Like email, I'd expect recieving to be more secure since it uses hardware the user isn't in control of.
There are free sites offering recieve-only SMS numbers, but they're almost universally at their rate limit for most services.
You probably risk some legal fallout though, so be cautious.
It occurs to me this "force you to send the sms" might be a way to avoid exactly this sort of thing.
I know you mean charge just these bulk senders, but if they didn’t charge consumers a similar rate too, whoever wants to spam SMS can just set up farms of consumer SIMs and dump them onto the network that way. In fact, they already do this.