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TxtGate is a simple SMS gateway running entirely on an Android phone. It works wherever the phone can receive SMS messages and go online (via wifi or GPRS), so it can provide an SMS gateway anywhere the phone works without needing to install hardware, deal with service providers etc.
When TxtGate is launched, it listens for SMS starting with a user defined identifier string. When a message is received, its content & sender phone number are sent as an HTTP GET request to a user defined URL, for example http://example.com/sms?sender=1234&msg=itp+hello
If the response body contains text, it will be SMSed back to the sender phone.
You can install TxtGate here – either by downloading the APK or using Android’s barcode scanner installation method.
Once the application is installed, launching it will display the following screen:
Pressing Menu will open the settings screen. There are two settings to configure:
- SMS Identifier: TxtGate will only handle SMS messages that start with this string. If you wish to handle all incoming SMS, set this to an empty value.
- Target URL: Once an SMS is received, TxtGate will do an HTTP GET request to this URL, sending the contents in
msgparameter and sender phone number insender. If the response body contains text, TxtGate will SMS it back to the sender phone.
- Android enforces an outgoing limit of 100 SMS messages per hour. However, there are ways to override this
- At the moment TxtGate does not remove received SMS, which means you probably want to use one of Android’s SMS auto delete applications to clean them up periodically (if you have good/bad experience with a particular application let us know, we’ll be happy to post it here)
- TxtGate is not meant for mission critical or high load applications in its current form. It works, but it’s a young codebase and yet to be tested in real use. Again, if you have feedback on real use we’d love to hear it.
On any feedback, questions, comments, etc please feel free to email [email protected]