iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."

Comments

Well,

[Jurily]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

Re:Well,

[vux984]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

Re:Well,

[Ostracus]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

Hmmm, yes let's all remember that the next time OSS is discussed.

Re:Well,

[RichardJenkins]

OSS stands for Open Source Software, not services. Why would you want to remember Google shutting down a free service when discussing open/free software?

Re:Well,

[thetoadwarrior]

Making money off of a free service by vastly increasing the cost of running the free service without offering compensation especially when the economy is going to shit.

Re:Well,

[digitalchinky]

In all, it probably only actually had a total infrastructure cost of about $15 USD to support every scrap of traffic across every involved SS7 link. (I pulled $15 bucks from my backside, it was likely even less than that) Millions of messages? Billions? Doesn't really matter, these links are up 24/7 anyway, and if they aren't being used then they just idle. Now the phone companies will have you think that every bit is encapsulated in 24 carrot gold, sent through diamond encrusted tubes, and polished brighter than the sun before being given the privilege of hitting the recipients dirty message queue. It very likely cost google a fair chunk of change though, but the phone companies, virtually nothing. SMS is a very tiny and largely insignificant bit of allocated payload riding on the back of the out of band signalling system. What you have here is a cash cow for the telco, nothing more, nothing less. It's pure genius driven by greed.

Free SMS can actually exist, just so long as the basic fee they charge for the service covers the infrastructure cost to run it each month, then end of story. This is likely not going to happen any time soon, remember, greed, uninformed customer base, cash cow.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

A tyranasaurus rex stepped on manners when it leaned over to bite politefulnesses' head off.

Re:Well,

[fractoid]

Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.

Re:TANSTASFL

[iamflimflam1]

So they were in the top 10 paid apps for 11 days. According to here if you are in the top 15 paid apps you'll be selling at least 2836 units a day. According to my maths, after Apple has taken their cut they'll have made about $20K Not bad...

Re:Well, Google HAD a business model!

[Anonymous Coward]

SMS is very profitable to service providers.

E.g. when developing SMS games around 2001, the raito of sent/received messages could go up to 4-5 sent by the game server / 1 sent by the user, and the provider would still buy the game.

Google's model was: enable GTalk and other programs to send SMS-es. The SMS-es are delivered to phones.

Now Google could allocate free sending quota from service providers telling them that these messages will be answered, and service providers can get their profit from the ANSWER SMS-es.

Now this where this iPhone program is dangerous to Google.
It cuts the single source of revenue from the providers: the response SMS could be also throught Google...

Just my 2 cents...

Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[krunk4ever]

Inner Fence's Official Statement

Google will soon block Infinite SMS and all other non-Google software from sending free text messages.

For now, Infinite SMS will continue to work, but when the block goes into effect, you'll start getting an error every time you try to send a text message.

If you have comments for Google, you can visit their Text Messaging Google Group.

Google has claimed no grievance with Infinite SMS other than its success. Their given reason for the block isn't abuse or wrongdoing; it's that we brought too many users (and thus too much cost) to an experimental service.

We acted in good faith, accessing a feature publicly announced by Google over open protocols they made available. Other non-Google apps have been able to access the SMS feature since its launch. To us, this was no different from accessing Gmail's near limitless storage over the open IMAP protocol. We never could have guessed that the two of us would write an app too big for Google.

Our first warning was an unexpected call from Google on Monday, 9 March 2009, indicating that the service might be blocked as soon as the very next day.

We asked them to reconsider or at least give us more time to change our program or migrate our users. We scheduled a call for the next morning to hear Google's final time line.

We immediately removed Infinite SMS from sale, since we could not in good conscience continue to sell a product whose lifetime was so likely to be cut short.

This morning, Tuesday, 10 March 2009, our email is overflowing with questions about why Infinite SMS is not available in the app store. We've decided we need to get real information out there for people, despite not having the complete picture yet. We will update this page when we hear from Google again.

We hope that Infinite SMS users will see this announcement and have some warning before they can no longer use our app for messaging.

Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds. Hopefully, at 99ï people will feel like our app paid for itself after only a few messages.

Google's free SMS feature isn't entirely gone. They've only blocked non-Google apps like Infinite SMS. You can still send free text messages through the Gmail web interface (but it doesn't seem like it works in Mobile Safari). The instructions are in their original SMS chat announcement.

Google's Official Statement

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we've decided we can't support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We're blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we're not singling out Inner Fence.

How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[PopeRatzo]

The people who sold this app were not "charging" anyone for Google's service. Would you say that someone who developed and sold a killer browser for iPhone was "charging" people to use the Web?

Re:Next target: AOL?

[MartinSchou]

I know somebody who set up an SMS spamming company in about 2000

Have you remembered to give him that special kind of "thank you" that we all know he deserves?

Shame, Shame

[bartwol]

Inner Fence *assumed* they would continue to receive a service for which they had no contract and paid no fees. Further, on top of that unsupported and inequitable assumption, they *sold* a product in which they extended *assurances* of continued service.

Inner Fence now points their customers to Google as being the party responsible for the loss of service. But it seems clear that Inner Fence had no basis for assuring delivery of their service to their customers. They simply took the money, left Google holding the bag, and now dodge their full responsibility.

Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?