An App Platform for Dumb Phones | Hacker News Reader

An App Platform for Dumb Phones

dumbsto.re

144 pointsramseynasser47 comments

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.

Wow. Thanks! We will be studying this thoroughly. I hadn't heard about it before.

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.

I actually spent some time looking into dumb phones a couple years ago. My favorite would be the motofone. It's got an e-ink display, which is great for battery and sunlight, and 2 antennas which is also great if you heaven forbid make actual calls with it. Also, pretty sturdy, small, and light.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

Beware though, if you txt a lot, you won't like it. Not enough real estate for the crazy font they use.

There are also these printed cell phones showing up. Do a google for "card phone". Pretty interesting.

I had a Motofone (also called F3) for the last 7 years. It started with a two week working battery life. It's a pain to text message on since it only shows 4 or 5 characters on, but it just worked as a reliable phone. Finally switched to an iPhone 5 after it became vital for me to have full Internet access 24/7 for work. If it weren't for that, I'd still have my F3. I love it as much as I love my iPhone 5.

You can still find some of them on eBay. I'd offer mine, but I'm keeping it as an emergency (911) phone for my car.

F3 to iPhone 5 has to be the biggest jump I've heard of lately. I've been meaning to pick up a dumbphone myself, maybe I'll grab an F3 - I remember when they came out, I was dying for one. It's a bit like buying the... junker of your childhood dreams.

I used this phone for about 6 months. The screen made it hard to navigate the menus and got in the way of even simple things like adding someone to your address book. The battery life was good but it was not significantly longer than the battery life of other dumb phones (since the screen is mostly off it doesn't make a huge difference).

Eventually I traded it in for a cheap nokia with an lcd.

I've been using the Motofone for three years now and I love it. The texting doesn't bother me either. It's also the lowest common denominator of phones that call and text, so we test all our dumb apps against it.

Do you happen to have a recommendation for an e-ink phone that is favorable for SMS?

Other than the F3, nope. There's not a lot out there (supposed to be an android one coming soon though).

http://www.eink.com/customer_showcase_cell_phones.html

You'd think there'd be more considering how ideal it is for outdoor visibility and battery longevity.

Googling for "card phone" doesn't actually bring up a lot of card phones. I see more prepaid cell phone cards and banks with mobile apps. The first card phone for sale isn't until page 2, and it's an eBay link.

I believe Nokia Asha line of phones is leading the charge in dumb phones in developing countries, Nokia Asha 501 being the newest. It has pretty freaking awesome (especially in countries where access to electricity is a luxury) 48 day standby time (beat that iPhone!). In addition, Asha 501 actually has some kind of support for 3rd party apps.

And if you want physical keypad instead of touchscreen, then the 301 is probably the best featurephone available. Similar crazy long battery life, good looking design, and all the features you'd need (aside flashlight). 301 also has 3G connectivity, so I believe it has better reception than pure 2G models such as 501.

I can't wait to get my hands on the 501 - I am pretty excited about this phone.

I have a Nokia 1202 that I keep in my emergency drawer, that I take with me hiking and so on. It's very reminiscent of the 3315 in build quality. It talks, it txts, it has snake. What more do you need!

I actively use a Nokia 100 (as my "family calling" phone - calling and minimal texting -only-). A brand new one cost £18.99, it has a monster battery life, is super light and yet an absolute rock in build quality.

I'm sure it has some additional bling like FM radio, a media player or whatever and some games, but I use literally use that phone for nothing other than calling and texting.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0068ZAPB0/

I lived for the last 2 years with a Nokia 1610. Highly recommend but they discontinued in January and a new model came out with a camera (which was against my minimalist ethos at the time).

I ended up breaking the chain and switching back to an iPhone 5 but this app store has got me pining for the simpler days of pure sms and voice based comms.

I'm also pretty frothy on this $12 phone.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040

Any used Nokia 3310 on eBay will probably outlive you.

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.

I'm doing my best to find change on the ground and in fountains and mailing them to Twilio.

paid apps? (android market start with only free apps)

"if this becomes popular"

is a nice problem to have, in general

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?

These are all great ideas. Case insensitivity has come up a few times and it's an easy fix. We should have it in soon!

fixed, thanks!

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.

Do you mean the interface of the website, or how you use it on your phone?

The website.

Noted.

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!

it's a little buggy, but we're getting there. dir is hard because it needs a city,st for each location. thanks for the rec!

dir can be buggy, depending on how you format your location names. Can you give me an example of what's not working?

I wasn't really sure what to expect, so I tried something that Google Maps gets correct: AOL in Palo Alto to Pier 39

I didn't feel like typing too much :) What service does it use?

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

thanks!

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.

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