Had a random thought today. I can't find or don't know of any mobile/smartphone app that is hostless other than using the SMS protocol.
The obvious reason for this is that a host is still required to manage data due to the size of it.
I had a thought today about how this could be overcome if one wanted to make a social app, by making use of the SMS protocol for managing and sending data from one user to another.
Your first thought maybe that there isn't a strong enough compression algorithm in the world to do this, but what if the app used a defined coded language whereby shorthand values and numerics translate to identifiers, words, phrases or even commands.
These shorthand values are then sent together in an SMS for transmitting and reading data between users, for all manner of reasons.
Text based data is cheap enough to store in an apps storage, and with a complete dictionary of words and highly popular phrases for a user's language.
Imagine a given agreed format of something like follows:
- U[NUMERIC] A shorthand value to identify a user's contact number
- W[NUMERIC] A shorthand value to identify a word
- P[NUMERIC] A shorthand value to identify a phrase
- E[NUMERIC] An emoji identifier
By making use of an in-app database, the app could send messages or issue commands, polls etc by translating identifiers.
For example a message like U+123456789W1P1E1 would tell the app to send a message to that number with the word with a numeric id of 1, phrase of 1 and emoji of 1. This could for example translate to "Hello how are you today?"
It could go into much more depth if a user wants to still send paragraphs of text.
This also could be done for image data by compressing and converting to ASCII the image and then sending as SMS, so this almost could work for a messaging app that supports messages, images, emojis, links and commands like creating polls etc.
This in theory could work for all kinds of apps that provide user connections. Messaging, internal work communications, social networking and more.
In Summary:
The medium required for a hostless structure has always existed in the SMS protocol, the issue was that no compression algorithm was strong enough to reduce the data. Rather than compression, use a defined coded language to translate shorthand numerical values to words, phrases, commands etc.