MMSBrowser

The home page of the app.
A page loaded through the app. Takes 5-10 seconds to load due to the speed of MMS texting.
Whats going on behind the scenes.

Inspiration

I wanted a way for users to load websites for free, especially in countries with limited or censored internet! All you need is a text messaging plan to access the web now!

What it does

When the user requests a webpage, the app automatically texts the link to my Twilio API phone number. In the backend, my server intercepts this link, loads the webpage, and converts it to a single file HTML page. The HTML page is then converted into a PNG, with each character of the HTML file representing a color on a pixel in the PNG image. This PNG is then messaged back to the user, where the app receives it and converts it back into HTML to display to the user.

Challenges I ran into

Many cell carriers automatically downscale the image when it is sent over text, so in order to protect against this only websites of a certain size (600 KB or less) can be effectively loaded. This allows loading most web pages though, including all of Google and Wikipedia.