textwire

A REX Technologies product. Browse the web and search from an Android phone that has no data connection, over plain SMS.

The phone sends a request as a text message to a number the server owns. The server fetches the page or runs the search on the real internet, reduces it to readable text, compresses it with a trained zstd dictionary, and sends it back as numbered SMS frames. The app reassembles them, asks again for any that went missing, and shows a clean, tappable page.

Site: https://tochi-mba.github.io/textwire/ (the landing page and the handbook).

Status: 0.1.0. The server, the Android app and the wire format are built and tested end to end in process, including lost and reordered texts. What has been seen on a real phone is recorded only in docs/ACCEPTANCE.md; a line there without a date has not been observed yet. CHANGELOG.md says what changed.

You can try it without a phone or an account: make simulate, then type s bbc weather london. That runs the real server and a virtual phone against recorded pages and sends no SMS.

What it costs to run

Every reply is paid for as outbound SMS from the server's Twilio number: $0.056 per SMS to a UK mobile in 2026-09. A search costs about $0.20, a page about $0.67. A hard daily budget (200 SMS by default) caps the damage from any mistake. The phone's own texts to the server ride on its plan.

Quick start for developers

git clone https://github.com/tochi-mba/textwire.git
cd textwire
make doctor     # what this machine is missing, and how to fix it
make install    # the server's virtualenv
make check      # every gate CI runs

docs/ONBOARDING.md is the full walkthrough. make run starts the server and its dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:8140/; make simulate runs the whole system in your terminal with no phone and no account.

Repository

Path	What
protocol/	The wire format, golden vectors, dictionary and fixtures.
server/	The Python server.
android/	The Android app.
benchmarks/	The performance baseline: SMS per page and pipeline speed, with make bench to compare.
site/	The landing page of the GitHub Pages site; the handbook beside it is built from this repository's Markdown.
docs/	Architecture, onboarding, operations, testing, acceptance, optimisation, a glossary, a FAQ, ADRs.

Licence

MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 REX Technologies. See LICENSE.