Is there a cross-platform mobile app dev environment that allow us to access the SMS inbox of the phone?
I would like to create messenger apps on different platforms(Android and Symbian at least) that plays around with SMS. I learnt that Phonegap and Mosync is currently not providing such API, and I am still finding it. Any suggestions?
MoSync allows you to send SMS, but like you say, it wont let you receive them.
I guess the reason is, most app only need to send sms, because incoming messages
can be picked up from a server. Also many apps use sms to generate spread/users,
once your app is connected to a IP service of some kind you just talk to the server.
There is of course the cost question, send sms costs app users money, receiving sms
can cost the service provider money.
Related
I'm trying to build a login system with a phone authentication system.
Does anyone of you have experience with this? I'm using fire base as a backend, and twilio for sending sms. So i need to send sms with a pin. i'm developing this app using (ionic + firebase + twilio)
Thanks
Twilio developer evangelist here.
In order to send SMS messages using Twilio you're going to need your own server so that you can make the API requests to the Twilio API. I checked through Firebase and there is nowhere for you to run your own code on there, which is a shame, though it does supply static site hosting these days, which is nice.
I recommend you take a look through the Twilio tutorials which will give you a good idea how to build an application that can perform the API requests for you. I might start by checking out:
SMS notifications in Node.js
Phone authentication using Authy in Node.js
(Authy is the best way of verifying and authenticating phone numbers and is part of Twilio now.)
Let me know if this helps at all.
We have an AppEngine that receives automatic data via email from remote sites and stores it into the datastore. We're using a 3rd Party SMTP host now, and /_ah/mail/ is working properly.
A lot of this data is coming from legacy microcontrollers, PLCs, smart meters and the like. They all have a configuration for email address, SMTP server, SMTP user/pass, From address, and interval.
We'd like to setup postfix on a g1-small Compute Engine instance to handle authenticated direct-SMTP connections for the incoming data, but there are no examples of anyone else doing this. Is it as simple as writing a postfix filter to take the data and POST it over to /_ah/mail on AppEngine?
Alternately, is there an easier way that we're missing? We are converting some of the devices to use POST/PUT where possible, but we have a lot of different devices, and that will take time.
Google App Engine provides an SMTP service for inbound email - messages sent to <anything>#<app_id>.appspotmail.com will be sent to /_ah/mail/<anything>. If your devices only need to send email into your system you could point them directly to GAE's mail servers.
Your suggestion of running a inbound mailserver on GCE and using it to forward to HTTP on your app is also a viable solution, and doesn't require abusing email servers. There are even companies that will do this for you!
How do Mobile Apps communicate with a server? Does this communication happen over HTTP or are there other methods (for instance, I guess a mobile app could open a socket)? Does this differ form device to device? Is there one most commonly used approach? If the communication happens over HTTP how do the URLs look like? Is there a way to identify the app based on the the "User Agent" in the HTTP request if the communication is happening over HTTP?
Mobile Apps can communicate with a server in many ways. Mobile apps can also use other features of the mobile. For instance SMS , MMS. Its pretty open really. Your question could be "how do computers communicate with a server?".
A mobile app can be a simple as loading a web page. This would be http.
The problem with mobile apps. They run on phones. There are lots of different phone manufacturers and its up to them (in some case the mobile phone operators also have weight) what to allow the programmer to do by the choice of operating system.
If you are getting started with mobile apps. Take a look at android its pretty simple to get going with if you know a little about programming.
As for the useragent. It depends but usually if you are using the http api on the phone, you can set the user agent to what ever you want it to be, its just a string.
Hope this helps!
Communication usually happens over http. Applications usually identify themselves in the User Agent field
I have developed a dating website built on top of the Google App Engine, to which I would like to add instant messaging, and possibly/probably audio and video conferencing.
Given that the users on the website do not want to share their personal details or real contact information, I am handling all of the login information and sessions without assuming that the clients have (or even want) a google account ID or any other login that is associated with their real identity.
I would like to hear suggestions on how I could go about adding instant messaging to my website given that I cannot just directly access Google Talk or some other existing service.
Would it make sense to use XMPP for this, and if so will Google Talk or any other XMPP service provider allow me to register new user accounts without manual intervention (ie. after a user is registered on my site, automatically register them with the XMPP provider)? Or, if not, perhaps I can use a single google ID with Google Talk with a different resource identifier for each user (me#google.com/user1, me#google.com/user2, etc...), and send messages between the different resources? Could this work, and/or would having thousands of simultaneous connections to a single account get me banned from Google Talk?
Perhaps some kind of AJAX based solution might make more sense given the fact that users are already registered on my website, but are not registered for an XMPP service?
Any suggestions about how I might approach this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards
-Alexander
Text chat is the easier problem. You can do either with or without XMPP. Without XMPP, you'll be building a Facebook chat type client on your pages that sends messages from each user to the app, and the app then shows then on the recipient's screen.(The client can be polling, or use comet when it comes out). Check out olark to see how this works.
Once you build code to use the app as a switchboard that routes the correct message to the correct person (anonymously, maybe), you can port this easily to XMPP if you require. Both parties add you.dating.site#appspotchat.com to their buddy lists, and you send all messages from girl#site.com to guy#site.com and vice-versa. (assuming a heterogeneous site.)
Audio and video, I have no clue how to do without sharing details between the parties :-/
I don't have a cell phone, but Google App Engine needs an SMS message to verify the account. Is there another way to complete the registration?
I'm surprised they don't use a Gmail account to do this.
Edit : Google created one for me, problem solved.
No. If you don't have a way to receive SMS, you can fill out the SMS issues form to have an account created for you.
You could sign up with any web based sms service that enables you to receive sms via virtual phone numbers.
The first one i found that offers a free trial was esendex.co.uk.
But quick search will get you many more.
Or you could just ask somebody to lend you his phone for 5min in ... receiving sms is free after all.
They probably don't use Gmail because there are too many Gmail accounts in the wild. Gmail now requires verification by SMS or a voice call, but it didn't always. App Engine is limited to SMS only (no automated voice call option).
You probably have a friend whose cell phone you can use.
Actually Google have instigated quite strong protection on new gmail accounts, at least here in the UK #googlemail.co.uk addresses require SMS confirmation as well.