Show HN: TxtNet Browser – A Web Browser That Communicates over SMS (opens in new tab)

Thanks for the praise, I know it's not a super huge scale project but it was a good challenge to develop. As far as speed goes, I'm not exactly sure. I know that Twilio's toll free numbers send about 5 SMS messages a second, so once many users use the app at once it would slow down significantly. One thing I'm working on is decentralizing the app so that a Server Android app could be run on a phone that has an internet connection, using that phone's phone number as a way to send pages. About speed, I just ran a test and checked google.com's file size (it's 112 bytes) and timed the page request, upon the first text arriving it only took 4.5 seconds to load. That's a staggering 40kbps! Pretty impressive as a best case scenario, but a bunch of factors will probably make the average a bit lower.

Thanks! Another user asked a similar question, so I tested loading a simple(r) website like Google. The stripped HTML totaled to 3.42kb, which took 4.5 seconds to transmit. That totals out to 0.76 kilobytes/second of raw transfer speed. This might be lower or higher than the average, but it's a good rough estimate that something like dial-up speeds aren't exactly feasible. This is definitely promising as an alternative when this is the only option available!

Thanks for the reply! I have considered this idea as a potential solution, which would overcome some of the hurdles of Android's SMS limitations. However, I think the real bottleneck for sending SMS would inevitably be the carriers. Though once I can get some more hardware on my hands, I'd love to try this idea out to see how feasible it might be. In terms of hardware requirements, it would still be a much lower barrier to entry to create a server app that houses the cellular modem and internet abilities into one single package, since no extra hardware cost would be required for small scale operations. But for larger operations, this is definitely the endgame assuming carrier restrictions allow throughput to be faster than achievable with Android.