I had read a lot of posts. But I still confuse what should I use. I'm developing an Android application school project.
The user can purchase a ticket from my application and the user's phone will be receiving text from the server. I had read through the C2DM, but I don't know if it is suitable to use in this application. The Free SMS gateway has a hard time finding it. Is there a solution?
Unless you have SMS module already running on the site, C2DM would be more feasible, I guess.
You should also consider the constraint that push notification (or even simple polling) will need data network available. However, using SMS service would probably mean that there will be extra expense. Both methods will need server-side running, so that's a draw.
Take a look at Twilio's API if you don't want to setup a gateway.
There are many options for an SMS gateway.
You can either setup your own or use a third-party provider. If you go with the later option, you will have to search for providers in your country. They will give you access to their API which gives you access to their SMS gateway. Multiple account options are available so choose the one that suits you.
If you want to setup your own gateway NowSMS is a very good option and it is very cheap as well. It has lots of integration examples and an API to send and receive SMS messages. Their compatibility with various GSM modems is very good as well. It even works with handsets if you have one plugged in. So if you have an old GSM handset lying around, you can use that as the modem with NowSMS. Read their documentation to see what models work.
Kannel do an open source free gateway.
Good luck.
You must take the SMS Gateway package from SMS Gateway website and use their HTTP API to send SMSes directly through your application...
In India, SMS gateways are really affordable, and you should not go to any free service, because they are not reliable.
Related
I recently created an app that sends and receives commands in the form of SMS text messages, being that sending a lot of text messages could become quite costly, i'm now looking for a new method to use to send and receive the data securely over the internet. Obviously one solution would be email, although I do not think this would be ideal due to emails stacking up and accounts etc.
So basically, i'd like some advice on what my other options are....
How would sending a command using TCP work in android and how secure would it be?
How would one go about setting up sending data over TCP?
Any feedback would be great, thanks
What your looking for is Google's Cloud Messaging service. GCM is the standard way to push messages to/from the client. It requires several components to implement, however. One being a database to store GCM ids. Another is a back-end to do this.
It essentially works like this:
User downloads and installs and opens the application
Your application sends a request with your application's unique identifier to google for their GCM id (have to register on google's app center site)
Google responds to the device with their GCM id
Your application then sends (via network services or ajax in a webview) their GCM id to your server, which stores it for future use.
All of these components, however, are good things to have for growth and infrastructure support. Postgresql is a good, open-source relational database.
Other options:
1 - You could use websockets (https://github.com/koush/android-websockets)
Websockets, however, could considerably draw down the user's battery, extremely quickly if the app communicates even if it's not open, like... 'whooosh'
The benefits of using websockets is that it detaches your communication from Google.
Depending on your principals and/or beliefs, you may choose to go 100% independent by using soon-to-emerge web standards for detachment. Google (lol) "Extending the web to support personal network services" written by John Lyle, Claes Nilsson, Anders Isberg, and Shamal Faily. It's a good paper on the mobile communication debate.
Is it possible to create a listener to get a message from whatsApp in android?
I mean like you have a broadcastReceiver to listen to incoming SMS in android...
Is any API is needed for that thing, or is it legal thing to do or I need to get any permission from whatsApp?
Whatsapp did not publish any official APIs.
There's this open source API for communicating with whatsapp, it's not official and might stop working if Whatsapp update their protocols.
https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI
Regarding the legality of using this or other non-official API, it depends on the service agreement that you agreed to with Whatsapp. Read it and see if they frown upon using their communication protocols with clients other than theirs. My guess would be they do not allow it.
UPDATE: This GitHub repository seems to have been taken offline due to legal threats.
It is possible, an example of an Android app that does this is Snowball - basic notification manager that can access WhatsApp message content. I'm not quite sure on how that works, but research Snowball to get more information on how it works.
It is also possible without Android, the source repository on GitHub has been taken down and put back up a few times due to legal threats.
If you do, however, manage to connect to WhatsApp's servers to access incoming and outgoing messages with a desktop app and you don't hide it well, your account will be blocked. WhatsApp notices accounts that send messages faster than it would take for a normal person to send - easy to notice because a human takes time to type, try delaying messages by a random number of seconds to try and hide this. Also note that WhatsApp's terms of service state that you may not run any automated system using the service, i.e. any external app. You may not use the service to advertise or spam (raises red flags pretty fast and gets your account blocked).
There is also another library written in Python which you can use write custom application.
It also has terminal client and you run it in interactive mode and also supports group messaging.
There are lots of issues to fix.However you should not be abusive with whatsapp service.Don't use it to spam users.This is reverse engineered library and therefore unofficial.
Here the link:-yowsup
I'm using C2DM in my Application to send data from mobile to mobile
But C2DM uses Google server(lacks data confidentiality) to redirect messages to device.
Is there any other way for sending data from mobile to mobile directly without any third party server?
I dont want to use SMS in my App.
Base on requirement (1) Without third party server (2) Between 2 mobiles.
Your options are limited to these:
WiFi Direct (Ad Hoc Network)
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/wifip2p.html
Bluetooth
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/bluetooth.html
NFC
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/nfc/index.html
You clearly said "no third party server". But may I suggest xmpp. I've had good luck with smack derived jars and OpenFire. You get a lot of flexible and easy to use functionality out of the box. It may be your best bet for chat type applications.
We host our own instance of OpenFire and authenticate against Active Directory. The XMPP protocol provides the user/device addressing, routing, and, optionally, store and forward capabilities.
It also makes it easy to exchange device data with applications written for other operating systems and in other languages. XMPP IQ packets can be used for lookup type transactions without the overhead of a Chat type connection (no presence information, back end XEP-114 plug ins to connect with server side resources).
Not really: your device has to know which device to connect to. You could theoretically do that if you know the IP of the device, but with mobile phones this changes frequently and I'm not even sure if mobile providers will let you connect directly to devices on their network. So, you're at least going to need a 'step' in between the two phones that you can trust to be stable.
What you could do is set up your own server, and let a user (user1) upload messages to your server addressed to a specific sender (user2). When the message is received, you can use C2DM to send a signal to user2's phone, and attach the message's unique identifier to this. When user2's app receives this message, you can proceed to download the message content from your webserver.
If you don't want to use any webserver at all, you're limited to the options mentioned by Calvin: WiFi, bluetooth or NFC.
Unfortunately having a direct socket connection between mobiles phones is almost impossible as they invariably are behind firewall. BTW also look at https://www.alljoyn.org/ Its an interesting technology as well.
I have developed a simple two player chess game in android to be played using Bluetooth. I want to extend it by making it possible to be played through internet. whenever a player makes a move, the move should be transferred to the other player via internet.
How to make this possible?
I have heard of C2DM mechanism.Does that suites the scenario i described and is it reliable?
Thanks:)
Yes, C2DM is ideally suited to this type of game. This is what I am using for my own game (http://www.chesspresso.net) which is a correspondence chess client for android.
Things to consider when using C2DM:
You don't send the info to the devices, you notify the devices that a move has been made. You don't use C2DM to transfer data, you use it to notify that something has changed.
Its available for 2.2+ Android, which is the majority of devices. But if you wanted to support older devices you'd have to consider an alternative. I am using polling for older devices.
You have to request for developer access, then once your app is ready you have to request production status. If you don't do this you'll hit the developer status quota very quickly once its released! They are very generous with production quota, but you have to explain what you're using it for and it also can take a few weeks to get accepted!
Your users will have to have a google account that is authorised, otherswise C2DM won't work. Most users will have an account associated with their device, but some don't so this means that you'll possibly want to validate for the presence of an account to notify the user.
Its reliable, but every now and again a device will have to wait for the message. Sometimes a few minutes. Usually its instant.
Hope that helps!
UPDATE:
C2DM has now been deprecated, and replaced by Google's GCM.
Also, I strongly suggest looking at other options as tying yourself down to a Google specific API means you won't be able to support external marketplaces. For alternatives, I am currently evaluating Amazon SNS and I will also be looking at Urban Airship. There are possibly other alternatives I have not considered evaluating yet.
UPDATE:
Evaluation update of non google based push notifications:
Amazon SNS is just not a project for this task and Urban Airship for the vast majority of apps is too expensive. Unfortunately all the other alternatives are all very expensive also, especially if your app (like mine) relies heavily on push.
A good way of doing that is using a simple direct TCP connection between the peers.
If you're new to socket programming on Java, try this:
All About Sockets
Another option is to use some sort of IM as a communication medium for app. For eg. Use Asmack to connect to XMPP Im like GTalk. Prompt user to create an account there, for your game.
And use it to send and receive commands via IM. This way you won't need to setup your mediating server.
This works if user knows who he is playing with. To collect the user data and let them search for available players, you still need to setup a server. IRC chat room may be an option to avoid this also.
GTalk was just an example. You can use any IM or IRC also.
C2DM it's not design to transfer informations, even if they are small like "horse in b4" or things like this. It's designed to inform the device of something, maybe a newer version of a document or more articles on a website.. Stuff like this.. It's not designed to communicate device to device. And also it may be not fast enough for a real time chess play.
You should look for a more traditional way of communicate via internet or to search for some libraries (I'm pretty sure that something exists..) that will help you.
IMHO, C2DM is exactly the kind of thing you would want for a chess game; to be notified when the oppo has made his turn (which may be minutes /hours / days later ?). I have discussed my game with a few google android devs and they've stated that C2DM is ideal for this. You'll need to go via a centralised server though (well, not essential but very advisable) as there may be issues with resync'ing game state etc. Worried about "hitting the limit" ? Well, for a start my c2dm acct is restricted to "just" 100,000 messages per day. I guess you're buying the drinks if you hit that !!
Chess is often played by email. You could do that.
Of course, any centralized/federated messaging system will work.
What might be better for your use is to add a jabber client to the application and have the program generate an account name that is used for automated messaging. You could host the jabber server or generate the accounts on a free provider.
Google App Engine if you know Python or Java.
Alternatively there are two web app API styles in wide use today: SOAP XML and RESTful web services.
If you know RoR I would recommend using JSON/REST, because you can just use Phusion Passenger with Apache to deploy your app. Free, extremely easy, and makes your server very reliable.
You could, and I only mention this because my friends do this all the time, use twitter as a server between the games.
I also found a lib called mages which looks quite promising.
Good luck.
I did this for my online 2D rpg: http://developingthedream.blogspot.com
Basically, use a middle-man server to co-ordinate data between all your clients.
You simply open a socket and communicate with the middle server and it takes care of passing on the information to any other connected clients.
I wouldn't recommend C2DM because of the message limit, and because the latency is still to big. Using your own server you can optimize it, plus you'll be the only one using the service so your data will be delivered faster.
I think that C2DM is not right way for playing chess because there is no warranty that messages will be delivered. You need more reliable way for data transfer
I've read many inconclusive articles regarding the mechanisms used by IM apps for mobile devices and I'd like someone to please clarify this for me. Do all IM apps for mobile devices simply use SMS? If not, how does the real-time communication between devices work? Is there an intermediate server? Thanks.
Most cellular carriers do not allow sockets which accept connections (servers) to run on mobile devices. As far as I understand, IM services with large numbers of users (e.g. MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Skype) rely on a server to transfer the messages between mobile clients. I make this conclusion because each client must log into the server in order to use the IM service; they offer no way to do peer-to-peer connections and avoid logging in to the server.
No, SMS is never used for what's considered instant messaging by most. If you want to develop instant messaging app, you'll need a server and push notifications. I recommend Parse Push, but you should take a look at Google Cloud Messaging, too. If nothing else, it will give you an idea on how this stuff works.