CODEWITHSUNDEEP
twilio
d-vine
d-vine

Reputation: 5547

Is there something similar to an extension for SMS?

The Scenario:
I have a exclusive mobile chat app. Users can communicate with preselected and know groups of people that don't use the app via an SMS bridge. For that purpose currently each user get's her/his own virtual phone number. SMS for an specific user are sent and received via this virtual number. The SMS are distribute to each member of the group she/he communicates with.

The Problem:
A single receiver can be member of more then one group. In this case, when a receiver (R) responds to an SMS message from the user (U), it is not unambiguously clear which group the response belongs to. Because the only available information is the sender (R) number and receiver (U) number (virtual) we can not be certain which of the groups that R belongs to the message came from.

Solution Idea:
The only way I can see to get around this problem is to have U use a different phone number to communicate with each group. Assigning each user many phone phone numbers for that case isn't scalable at all because of the costs. But I also would at least initially like to avoid the complexities of managing a vast number pool that automatically assign numbers to individual communications.

Question:
Is there any way at all to add additional digits to the senders virtual number when sending an SMS? So that when he/she replies to that number, the context is transmitted back to the server

Upvotes: 0

Views: 49

Answers (1)

philnash
philnash

Reputation: 73055

Twilio developer evangelist here.

I'm afraid there isn't anything within SMS that does what you need. You were right when you supposed that U should have a different phone number to communicate with each group.

It's not all bad though, because you can set up which users are in a particular group, you can reuse that number for a completely different group. Here's a good article on scaling number pools for group messaging that might help.

Upvotes: 1

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