sms

Recently, I came across on reddit a very cool project – the “Cosmos Browser” – which is a browser which sends HTTP requests over SMS. Communicating over SMS isn’t a novel concept – many SMS APIs exist to communicate between the phone and the outside world (Chicago’s Bus Tracker being one such example). What’s striking here is that I finally understand why these APIs exist: why, given all the smartphones in the world today, with their fancy app stores, would we want to still make apps based on SMS communication? One of the app-makers in the original Reddit post mentioned that a strength of this is the J2ME architecture of the browser – that is, we can install the browser on not just smart phones, but dumb phones as well.