Twitter kills off SMS notifications and posting in most countries

This reminds me of how I hacked twitter 10+ years ago to get free SMS delivery for a web app I built. Before Twilio, custom SMS notification delivery was hard and expensive.<p>At the time, twitter allowed you to receive SMS notifications of tweets posted to a followed account. I created a private account and used twitter&#x27;s API to post tweets to with the notification content I wanted to send. I then had &quot;dummy&quot; accounts follow the &quot;notification&quot; account. These dummy accounts had recipient phone numbers with SMS notifications turned on.<p>The flow was: Web App -&gt; Twitter API -&gt; Tweet from &quot;notification&quot; account -&gt; followers received SMS notifications. Free SMS delivery!<p>It was clunky and SMS notifications looked like they came from twitter (they did) but it solved my use case perfectly.

There&#x27;s some irony in that Twitter have moved on from the 140 character limit, and now cutting off SMS. Both were core features of the platform when initially launched, so that it coupled nicely with mobile&#x2F;cell phones (obviously in the pre smartphone era).

He writes: &quot;Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either.&quot;<p>But this is not necessarily true, as spoofing a source phone number of an SMS is a lot easier than receiving an SMS that was sent to another number.

&gt; I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS.<p>I&#x27;d have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.

Twitter has degenerated into one of the least friendly things to build an app for. I&#x27;ve had a better dev experience with Gab, ffs.<p>Not only that, but also their community building and tending is abysmal too, so your app will end up used mostly by the kind of user that brings infinitesimal value with them.<p>Twitter isn&#x27;t worth it.

This is quite unfortunate. In countries where whether the people have access to internet or not is under the control of the government, this was a neat work around to get voices heard. In the recent history, an &#x27;internet lockdown&#x27; has been the MO of many (oppressive) governments, including India.<p>edit: removed a comment on about 2-FA as it takes away from the intended point.

I was on a flight a couple years ago that had free texting through T-Mobile.<p>What else to do but use Twitter through SMS? It was surprisingly still very good--could follow the news at very low bandwidth.

I mean, Twitter over SMS made perfect and necessary sense back in the first decade of its life.<p>But honestly the time has long since passed where it still makes sense to support. Smartphone notifications with the app are far superior in every way. (And if you don&#x27;t want to install the app? I mean, just don&#x27;t use Twitter then.)<p>And the only people who don&#x27;t have smartphones these days are the kind of people who have made an intentional choice to reduce their always-on digital connection. They are the very least likely people to use Twitter anyways.<p>It&#x27;s a good thing when a company is able to simplify its software architecture to remove code that&#x27;s expensive to maintain and keep protected from security vulnerabilities.

I &quot;lost&quot; 250,000 followers back in the day due to a Twitter change.<p>People used to think we— @Twitter_Tips —worked for Twitter. When Twitter forced us to change our username to @TweetSmarter, @Twitter_Tips became a &quot;new&quot; account (that no one could use) that started with zero followers. In a few weeks it racked up over 250,000 followers—that were &quot;ours&quot;—because of all the press, blogs, lists, good will, etc we had on that account.<p>We supported the great software ecosystem that grew up around Twitter, and watched closely as Twitter killed it all off.

I remember when the ability to use Twitter via SMS was touted as a way to help people communicate around firewalls and internet outages or restrictive data plans. I&#x27;m not sure if there was ever a strong case for that, but the idealist in me feels that this is a loss for some of the least connected.

Wait!!!!!<p>So Dan was a freeloader, instead of HIM paying the cost to notify HIS subscribers (aka TWITTER followers), he externalised&#x2F;rolled off the cost to Twitter. Now that Twitter wants to do some cost-cutting and Dan has to pay HIS own &quot;phone bill&quot; for HIS customers, Dan is calling out on Twitter? Suck it up bro.<p>When I hear people complaining that &quot;in our office they changed the coffee to a shittier one&quot;, I know what this is a prelude for avalanche of cost cutting measures. SMS in Twitter are being switched off? Blame the folks that created their business on someone else&#x27;s £€¥$ and the Twitter shareholders came calling for more profit.<p>I wonder what are the savings that Twitter is making by flipping that switch off...

Wow, it’s been more than 10 years since twitter was born. Can’t believe they’ve been running txt based version for this long. Does it mean the mobile web has finally penetrated enough countries where browsing is as cheap and accessible as text?

Author’s claims are valid. SMS is still relied upon in countries without stable internet connection. Twitter should use its resources to fix the vulnerabilities and not just kill it off. Seems like they are straying away from their mission of allowing everyone to create and share ideas without barriers.

Twitter via SMS stopped being useful when they blocked sending commands via SMS.

I&#x27;m curious how much money Twitter is saving by cutting the option.

My wife will be disappointed, she still uses it regularly.

TXT2MOB IS DEAD!<p>LONG LIVE TXT2MOB!

Good. SMS 2FA should follow.