SMS is Great
December 12th, 2006
No wait SMS is retarded…
I just got finished reading a post on Mobile 2.0 which was very interesting and a comment led me to revisit my love/hate relationship with SMS.
SMS provides mobile developers with the potential to access the majority of cell phones that are in the market today. This is a great thing. I can write killer mobile applications that can be accessible by over a billion people. Sweet!
I could write a severe weather SMS alert application that could potentially be life saving or a sports score SMS application that could be marriage saving (yeh, all you football fans could join your wives at the Mall on Sunday and secretly stay up to date on your scores via your phone). Not killer apps, but you get the idea…
But wait, let’s say I get 1% of all cell phone users to use my cool new SMS service. Yippie for me, right? Wrong… if each user fires up my application just a few times a week that would cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 million dollars a year to operate. Ouch!
If I make this service available thru a web page or client/server application, then it will cost me about a thousand dollars a year to operate. That is jacked up! Several orders of magnitude lower in price and several orders of magnitude higher in capability by not using SMS. Yes, I know that I can’t get to all those cell phones if the mobile device needs a browser or the mobile device has to be able to run my client. What’s a mobile developer to do?
I love SMS and the opportunities it provides for mobile developers, but the pricing is crazy and stifling!
Entry Filed under: Mobile
1 Comment Add your own
1. Neil Cowburn | January 9th, 2007 at 8:19 am
I know this is not as pervasive as SMS, but email could be the answer. Most new phones have an email client, and unlike SMS, email can be taken from phone to phone. Also, the infrastructure for email is widely established and it costs a fraction of the cost of SMS.
Email is ubiquitous in the desktop environment and is very quickly becoming ubiquitous in the mobile environment too. Also the most unique and universal digital identifier a person holds is their email address.
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