Web Application that receives images, videos, and text via Text Message

Question

I've seen many examples of this (clickatell.com among them) that only support text in the USA. I need my application to receive images/videos from text messages (MMS?) from users. The web app needs to receive a way to identify the user (phone number) and the actual files (in the same fashion facebook has implemented for sharing photos via phone). Any ideas on how I can accomplish this? Would it be better to just create an app for iPhone and Android instead?

Location: United States (East Coast)

Answer 1

There may (or likely is) some MMS gateway that will allow your app to appear as another phone number (or short code), but I'm pretty sure you can just have people send the MMS message to an e-mail address. I believe that's standard (as in all carriers support it).

You'll just have to parse the sender's e-mail to find the phone number, and grab the attachment to find the file. You may need to 'detect' the correct attachment as some carriers add branding elements to the email.

Updated: From Wikipedia, it seems MMS to email gateways are 'common', but I guess not required.

E-mail and web-based gateways to the MMS (and SMS) system are common. On the reception side, the content servers can typically receive service requests both from WAP and normal HTTP browsers, so delivery via the web is simple. For sending from external sources to handsets, most carriers allow MIME encoded message to be sent to the receiver's phone number with a special domain.

So if your app needs to be completely accessible to everyone, this solution may not work. It is worth mentioning that popular file sharing site drop.io just uses an e-mail address for its MMS send/receive.

Answer 2

It's perfectly possible if you setup your own WAP gateway - usually this requires integration with the service providers - and they'll probably only be interested in talking to you if you'll be processing large volumes of messages (>10000 per day). If this does describe you, then you might want to have a look at Kannel.

For very small volumes, then you could achieve this with just a mobile phone and, again, Kannel. See the Kannel docs for supported devices.

If your volumes are somewhere in between, then you should probably be talking to a service aggregator (like clickatell) - sorry but I don't know whom provides such a service in the US.

HTH

C.