Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?

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  • sydent

    Sydent: Reference Matrix Identity Server

  • I have a second SIM card that T-Mobile gave me for free (no idea why). I have it installed in an Android phone running Tasker with a bunch of jobs I created to do various things. Android phone stays at home while my primary (flip phone) comes with me. I get specific Matrix (https://matrix.org) messages forwarded to my flip phone, I can query the weather, I have a couple RSS feeds forwarding, and I can enable/disable any of these tasker profiles by sending custom commands from the flip phone back to the android. Obviously this requires having a second SIM card, but you could probably find a super cheap talk/text (or text-only?) prepaid plan temporarily and set up something similar. Tasker is extremely powerful and could conceivably do most if not all of what you're asking.

  • ipos

    IP over SMS- leveraging SMS to provide IP connectivity

  • IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course.

    So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304409

    You could possibly port something like https://github.com/PiMaker/Teletun to SMS instead of using Telegram. The Python TUN API seems quite elegant to work with, if you can get two SMS capable devices running Linux you can probably set up the world's worst wireless AP.

    Some students had the same idea and built a proof of concept: https://www.thomasclausen.net/en/nice-student-project-at-eco...

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • Teletun

    Discontinued IP over Telegram, because why not.

  • IP packets contain 20 bytes of headers, the rest is data. Theoretically you could create the world's worst VPN by stuffing the 140 bytes of an SMS absolutely full of binary data, with some compression of course.

    So I went looking for "IP over SMS" and actually found this: https://github.com/spandanb/ipos but it's for web browsers only. This old HN thread talks about the same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304409

    You could possibly port something like https://github.com/PiMaker/Teletun to SMS instead of using Telegram. The Python TUN API seems quite elegant to work with, if you can get two SMS capable devices running Linux you can probably set up the world's worst wireless AP.

    Some students had the same idea and built a proof of concept: https://www.thomasclausen.net/en/nice-student-project-at-eco...

  • CosmosBrowserAndroid

    Cosmos Browser allows a person to connect to the internet through the use of SMS. No data or wifi required.

  • In 2014, I had a similar problem so I created Cosmos Browser, an Android based internet browser which allowed people to connect to the internet via SMS. It's pretty much dead now, but wouldn't take a lot of work to revive it if you really wanted to.

    https://github.com/ColdSauce/CosmosBrowserAndroid

  • rapidsms

    Build SMS applications with Python

  • This doesn't directly answer your question, but there's a nice SMS interface framework available for Django called RapidSMS[0]. It's been a few years since I've played with it, and never got around to testing "in the wild" / with a real phone, but, it makes the Request/Response <-> SMS gateway mapping pretty easy to navigate

    [0] https://github.com/rapidsms/rapidsms

  • phoneHome

    a suite of tools to make your dumbphone smarter... but not *too* smart

  • A while back a buddy of mine wrote a Python framework that does pretty much exactly this! It has several demo modules already, such as fetching a weather report and requesting an Uber.

    https://github.com/hunterirving/phoneHome

  • smsdialup

    An SMS based dialup network that uses two or more mobile phones.

  • My mate created kind of SMS dialup a few months ago, but (in my opinion) it's poorly implemented (if anyone would like to implement it in a better way I don't think he'd mind)

    https://github.com/acejr1337/smsdialup

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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  • server-text

    A simple service that allows you to run commands on the server using text

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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