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."

Re:Well,

[Aranykai]

Ive been sending sms messages to sprint users for free for years now. Just add @messaging.sprintpcs.com to then end of their phone number and send it as an email.

Im sure most other providers do something similar.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[iamflimflam1]

As I mentioned in an earlier comment. If they got into the top 10 as they say they did and they were there for 11 days there must have been a significant number of downloads of the app: 20-30 thousand maybe? All sending hundreds of free SMS a day (it's free after all!). So that's an extra 2-3 million messages being sent on a daily basis...

Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[krunk4ever]

Inner Fence's Official Statement [innerfence.com]

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.com].

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 [blogspot.com] by Google over open protocols [google.com] 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 [blogspot.com].

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.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

Lots of carriers have SMS gateways [blogspot.com]. :)

WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Skylinux]

Ohh this is funny, iPhony customers are already bitching on Googe groups http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-text-messaging/topics [google.com]

Someone even created an "Online Petition" http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/googlesms/ [ipetitions.com]

We wanz ourz free stuff back!!

lol

Re:Well,

[Sophira]

Most people in the US do.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[rrossman2]

You had to BUY the app off of the IPhone Store, right? The author of the iPhone app just made money, right? They are using a service Google provides without compensating Google in any fashion, right? So which part of that wouldn't constitute charging people to use Googles' service, since it sure seems you had to BUY the app which gave the iPhone programmers MONEY, and the app used GOOGLES SERVICE to send the SMS MESSAGES...

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[SuperAlgae]

When people buy this app, they are paying for the functionality that comes from the combination of the app's software and Google's service. If a major differentiator for the app is its use of Google's service, then they are effectively charging for that service.

Ask yourself this. Of all the apps people could buy, why would they buy this one? Does its competitive advantage come from the excellence of the app itself or from its use of Google's service?

Does this constitute "abuse"? I'm not sure that it does, and I think even Google has not claimed such. But it is overuse, even if unintentional, and it is a form of "charging".

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[nicklott]

The BBC calls them narcissists: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7943906.stm [bbc.co.uk]

Yes, a generation of self centred jerks who've never been told they're wrong; I look forward to the bright new future...