Sending "alert/notification" to cell phone from website

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+1 Q:

Sending "alert/notification" to cell phone from website

I was wondering if there was a way for a website to send an alert/notification to a cell phone (smart phone, android, iphone... stuff like that) where the notification will ask the user a question and they have to answer the question and the response is sent back to the website and their answer is logged in the database.

I would also like to know if this notification could have checkboxes? I am needing this for a project and would like to know if there is anything out there like this.

If you need more description, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

+3 A:

Short of building an application for each specific phone to handle this alert, not really.

What I would do if I were you... allow users to subscribe to these alerts. When you send them, send them a link to a mobile web page. Now, keep in mind that most people don't have a data plan, or even know what to do with it. It would be best to allow replies over SMS as well. Without more details about what you are doing, it is hard to give a better answer.

Google around for an SMS Gateway. There are nearly infinite options with various pricing... so you will need to find the one best for you. Alternatively, you can send messages to the SMTP address. For example, [email protected] will send a text message to a Verizon customer with the number of 0123456789. SMS is more reliable though.

Brad 2010-09-24 18:06:39

Responding to Brad, i basically need to send a message to a user asking a question. I need them to respond to the question with an answer. I need to be able to log that answer they sent via sms and put it in a database. Is that possible?

prolink007 2010-09-24 18:35:52

Yes, you can do this with an SMS gateway.

Brad 2010-09-24 18:37:27

Thank you Brad, your input has been helpful. I am not going to check this as my accepted answer until a few other people reply, just in case they know something else. Thanks

prolink007 2010-09-24 18:40:01

I'll backup this comment. The main issue is that, for a phone to do this, they need to have services installed that would ping your site for whether there is a new question over and over. Thus, you'd have to create a service for every kind of phone, plus they would have to install it, plus the service would have to be running constantly, plus it would have to do this at a set interval of time. Users wouldn't really like that. As for checkboxes in notifications - The normal Notification class doesn't allow it. Toasts can have custom views but I'm not sure if checkboxes are allowed or not.

AndrewKS 2010-09-25 03:52:49

@AndrewKS: See CommonsWare's answer, Android can wake applications with a message pushed to the device without the app needing to constantly poll.

adamp 2010-09-25 16:57:41

I need this to work for multiple platforms. Would like to have it where the user does not have to download an application for this to work. But if the user did have to download a small application for this notification and checkbox idea to work, how could i send a general message to a phone that would activate an app on different mobile devices, such as iphone, android, blackberry... so on.

prolink007 2010-09-26 16:06:04

+2 A:

C2DM will solve this problem, for newer Android devices.

CommonsWare 2010-09-25 01:35:46

Need something that would support multiple platforms. Thanks, i will look into this anyways.

prolink007 2010-09-26 16:06:38

ansaurus

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Sending "alert/notification" to cell phone from website

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