iOS Send outgoing messages using general SMS system?

[imanta]

I was wondering if the iPhone SDK makes it possible to send an outgoing message using the general SMS functionality? I don't care about inbound messages so this isn't about running in the background, I just want to send a quick reminder SMS out to a number (from address book or other).

I didn't see any specific documentation about this at all, so I am guessing no?

 

[italiano40]

yea that was left out of the sdk so not to run up the SMS bill

 

[imanta]

Seems like it should have been the user's decision whether or not to run up the bill instead of Apple's or even the developers. Plenty of cool things we could do if we had access to that...

 

[Enuratique]

Seems like it should have been the user's decision whether or not to run up the bill instead of Apple's or even the developers. Plenty of cool things we could do if we had access to that...

You can always go the poor man's route of sending an email to their phone_number@their_carrier.com (or some variety thereof) which will get translated to an SMS for you by the carrier. But I can see why they left this out - it at least gives Apple developers some leverage/superiority in what kind of capabilities their applications can have versus the rest of us. Plus, it could be dangerous in terms of running up a bill.

 

[imanta]

This is an interesting idea, but if you don't know what carrier they are on then you are forcing the user to input say a friend's carrier which they may or may not know. It would be great if there was a platform independent service you could use to do this type of proxying or a way to get a carrier from a phone at the very least.

 

[slycrel]

A friend of mine and I looked into this some. You can open apple's SMS text screen by using "SMS://[number]", but we couldn't ever get it to work with filling in any additional data. So you kind of can, but not really. Looking in the documentation it doesn't look like this is particularly supported. Let us know if you find a slick way to do this.

Edit: For clarification, we were using the OpenURL call (I think that's what it was), the same as if you're sending a link to safari to open a webpage.