Less than 2 weeks ago the news appeared about a new web browser for Android that was to revolutionize the idea that you need to have internet to be able to explore the web.
The way you do this navigation is via SMS messages. A web browser that can be of great help in certain circumstances where there is a signal but no internet connection. Just today it is already released to the Play Store to be downloaded and try this "strange" way of browsing the web through SMS messages.
Browse using SMS messages
The method that Cosmos Browser uses is quite unheard of since it uses SMS to receive the information from the url that we want to visit through our phone.
A URL is sent, and Cosmos will send back a reduced version of the web page that you want to visit with only the text. All this will be done through SMS messages, so it will be vitally important that you have a good sum of free SMS or a data plan that has unlimited SMS.
In detail Cosmos Browser
Cosmos Browser will be in charge of treating the source code of the web that you want to visit to process it through Javascript and CSS to send a series of text messages via SMS. Don't expect images, Cosmos sends nothing but text.
Developer's words: «A user enters a URL, the app send an SMS to the Twiio number of Cosmos which sends the URL as a POST request to our Node.JS backend. The backend accesses the URL, takes the HTML source, minimizes its content, removes CSS, Javascript and images, compresses it in GZIP, encodes it in Base64 and sends back a series of SMS messages. The phone will receive this data via SMS, with 3 SMS per second, it sorts them, decompresses and displays the content.»
Launch issues
The app is currently not available for our country in the Play Store, although you can now download the APK or have the source code in Github, Has API token limit exceeded by Twilio. Expecting them to remedy this at some point, assuming that due to high demand it has exceeded their expectations. I will update this same entry as it becomes available.
a great idea
This app will surely not be needed as long as we have internet, but always can come in handy for certain circumstances where the data coverage is limited and we have unlimited SMS to know certain information that we want to have.
A Cosmos Browser app, which while its availability arrives in our country or that the token limit disappears, as an idea it is something special in itself and that shows the versatility of Android in general. Hence, surely many of you install it in your terminals.
Well, Opera did the same several years ago with Java, only I don't know if I use SMS