The main qualities of services for receiving SMS
Let's highlight the main functions of services that inspire confidence of users on which the project's profit depends in the future.
- The constant availability of numbers and their number will always remain an urgent problem for all services, since some countries block this type of activity, and for the user this is the primary factor where he looks when visiting the SMS receiving service.
- The price for one room is the next point where the user looks when choosing a service.
- The speed of number arrival - the faster, the more confidence the user has in this service.
- The number of countries with the availability of numbers - gradually expanding the network of numbers, the number of interested users from different countries to the service is also growing, so this item is one of the most important in the development.
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- Multithreading - the ability to order a large number of numbers in parallel with each other, this will allow you to order codes for different registrations at the same time.
- The presence of an API - the software interface will allow you to scale your project and integrate it into various systems (auto account registrars, promotion services, automation of the service for the client).
- Additional chips - this item includes chips that are not available for service sites, for example: auto copying a number, auto playing a code, auto copying a sent code.
These points are the basis for each service and their quality is, of course, assessed by their availability. It is clear that all this is automated and requires constant support from the project team.
Fight against SMS receiving services
It's no secret that protection against automated "botosystems" has always been and is being carried out. Everyone protects their project as best they can and comes up with their own methods of protection, in addition to the basic ones. They introduce time limits for registration, puzzle riddles in addition to solving captcha, by hardware, poppy addresses, gps, screen window size, using a call to the phone, and also many others, and in most cases it helps, but not 100%, all of these the consequences of protection run into the internal security of any online project.
The presence of vulnerabilities in it, to which the laziness of the developers or the customer's unwillingness to spend additional funds on protection turns a blind eye; in the end, all protection is aimed at identifying a person from "bot-like" mass actions.
But all this does not prevent the existence of "manual mobile bots" (users for whom one account is not enough, who use mass registrations for their own purposes), on mobile devices there can be up to two hundred telegram accounts for sending spam or cheating.
And now mobile messengers, which in 2020 gained their popularity in the context of the global crisis, due to massive registrations in telegram, discord, google, whatssap, viber and other social media. networks, the indicators of mass registrations due to bots soar in ratings to the top in terms of audience.
SMS receiving services for Android
In pursuit of capturing the market of the target audience, projects rushed in, which decided to cover all the need for this niche. Therefore, a sufficient number of projects with different types and different functionalities were stamped, but no one took care of their quality, there are those that work for free, but with annoying ads, numbers are torn over and over again and codes do not come at all, according to estimates in the Play Market and reviews in general their use is not recommended. Therefore, it was decided to take on a new project, which will be reimagined for Android in a new face and with a new meaning, which will be able to cover all the points of quality service. We will move on to the analysis a little later.
Comparison of browser services and applications
Let's start with services! Going to the needs of the user, we got a base of requirements for such projects, which are slowly acquiring functionality, but everything that an ordinary user would like to see remains unavailable, for his contemplation he only has to dream that his favorite service will bother to create an application for a mobile device ...
But no, let's dispel all thoughts and disappointments by calculating the profitability of creating such a project, since the main income of services is the provision of APIs to automated systems for bot ecosystems, ordinary "users" are content with "what they have" and, in theory, should be satisfied.
But what's the catch? And let's calculate the time that the user spends, so that every time he needs to get a number, he needs to log in to the site, although there is an additional one. features related to cache, saving passwords, services impose a session restriction in order to worry about the safety of their clients, and after authorization, finding the desired page is a bunch of routine actions that wastes the user's time every day. What about traffic? Valuable kilobytes go away with fluidity in time.
Therefore, with the deepest efforts and at high speeds, the basic requirements for the project for mobile development for Android were thrown.
Android development experience
Quality requirements (points 1-15, available above) + additional functionality that is not available in browser-based service sites:
- auto copying the number after ordering to the clipboard.
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The next task was to determine which development platform to choose and in the future to develop not only an Android application, but also for other operating systems.
The choice was between Android Studio and Visual Studio Xamarin, having weighed all the pros and cons, the platform on Visual Studio Xamarin was chosen, since the C # language is more to my liking, plus there were some developments in C # and in the future if the project comes up, it would be possible integrate it for IOS and UWP.
But here the pitfalls began for the first time I encountered the text markup "xaml", which ate one week of my time, as the task was to create a simple minimalistic user interface, without "quacozyabers" and other anti-readable fonts. Having dealt with the textual markup, having written a couple of basic functions, we started debugging, nothing boded trouble.
And then the question became an edge: Why this application if no one can use it?
Realizing all the risks, a Google Play developer account was bought for $ 25, but for its publication, it is still far away, the question "How to monetize without authorization?"
The idea came up to come up with an algorithm that would encrypt and decrypt the key and thus the project would be monetized.
Then the first version was launched, which was published a month later, referring to the quarantine.
Okay, the project is ready for the first version, how to promote it? In the Google Play Console, a function was found that allows you to promote a project on the Play Market platform using advertising, it was decided to donate $ 10 for a month, but this did not bring much return and only 2 keys were purchased for the entire time.
So how and on whom to test, where to attract customers?
Another philosophical idea was to try to distribute your application, on sites that pirate applications, the meaning was that they would throw an apk for them, they would upload it + in return I would get PR, no one of course did it for free.
Well, without hesitation, it was decided to post it on the forum . This gave a positive experience, for the application in terms of further development, the main errors were identified by the forum users, as well as criticism that was directed to improving the stability of the application, a key was provided for testing, for 20 days of using the test key, 500 rubles were spent on numbers by users forum.
Okay, we found errors, tested the application, and in the Play Market, according to audience retention statistics, there are less than 10 people and no one buys keys, what is wrong?
Having reached the point of multilingualism, it became clear that most of the audience of the Play Market is English, so the next step was to create a multilingual application, which, as later, I had to regret and this should have been laid down in the first stages of application design, since now you have to make all the text for transfer to the project resources, link through the constructor and check whether the application works with this encoding, conspiracy theories with a dot "." and comma "," in "ru-Ru" encodings (exception with "." works with ",") and "en-US" (does not display with "," works with "."). And yes, that's all when using the double type. So use the remainder of the integer division in your projects correctly, not as it turned out for me that I had to rewrite a two-month code!