Hopefully something comes along and helps out in this regard.
But out of curiosity, what would that solution look like? Like it or not, SMS doesn't really use the cellular data services your data package pays for. It works through a different aspect of GSM (which has been covered
ad nauseum already), and it's tied as a system to phone numbers. If you're a large company like AOL running a chat service, you can afford to set up banks of temp numbers that allow people to send and receive SMS from an IM gateway. But when someone SMS's your phone, they're sending their message to
your phone number -- it goes straight to AT&T and then gets pushed out to your phone.
How would an app go about intercepting this process in a way that wouldn't involve you being charged?
So then alternatively, the best you would
ever get is that someone would create an app and backend that would assign you
another, different phone number purely to use for the purpose of receiving (and sending) SMS. But then someone has to pay for maintaining that infrastructure, because a phone number isn't something you can just obatin for free. The VOIP services like Skype don't even give you a dedicated incoming phone number for free. Services like eFax do, although they're ad supported at the free level.
So, the solution... the best solution that's technically feasible... that you might get someday is that you'd have a second phone number for SMS that would be free, most likely ad supported. And your friends would all have to put this second phone number in their phones and text you at the alternate number (since such a system would have no way of preventing you from being charged for texts at your actual phone number).... That's the best that's even feasible. And that's why there are tons of apps to send SMS for free over the net and none to receive it....
Is all of that really worth $5 a month?
