Droidcon India 2012

The proposed session will outline technical approaches developers could choose to build a backend framework that enables communication where users have low data plans or are offline to access any of their android apps via SMS

Outline

90% of Indians are on mobile phones with no Internet - which is about 600M users approximately. We want to help you tap into this audience via SMS serving the info and services your android app provides.

In this talk we are hoping to demo how any android app built can be made to serve information without the need of expensive data plans. We are using the txtWeb Platform to enable this. txtWeb is a global platform where anyone with a mobile phone can discover and consume internet and txtWeb-only content just by SMSing keywords (very much like entering domain names into internet browsers) to ONE national number, and receive back content (up to 900 characters per SMS). Keywords represent an almost unlimited number of applications that use content from the internet or have their own original content. These applications are created by an open community of publishers and developers (which can be anyone), and can include Wikipedia content, local market prices, government programs, financial literacy tips etc. A user can think of txtWeb as an SMS-based browser, but much more accessible than web-browsers on computers since anyone with a simple feature phone can use it.

Also, importantly, for publishers, developers and businesses, txtWeb is one of the fastest platforms to make content and services available to billions. Deploying existing static content via a txtWeb site takes only 5 minutes. Creating and deploying a dynamic SMS-based application on txtWeb usually takes about 5 hours.

Additionally we will demo today how we have built android apps, which can be used either over WiFi, or over SMS depending on the user’s network connectivity. You would still have access to any app built over txtWeb over SMS even if you don’t have an internet connection, as this app seamlessly switches between SMS/WiFi automatically.

Learn about how two engineers in their whitespace (unstructured time) developed an Android application for an SMS based Platform - txtWeb.

Speaker bio

Gopi Krishnan : Currently working at Intuit India Development Centre on the development of the txtWeb Platform, after completing his B.E from PES Institute of Technology. His interests include Mobile Platforms and Machine Learning.

Pranay Airan : Completed his M.Tech from IIIT Bangalore in 2011. Currently working with Intuit India. 3 of his apps are in Google Play (Refer links)

Links

• http://developer.txtweb.com/
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binarybricks.lowprice
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binarybricks.startupdeck
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binarybricks.yummytrains

Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/gkrishnan304/take-your-app-offline-via-sms