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> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second th

> I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS. I'd have to second this guess. SMS is much more expensive than push notifications.

cassalian 6y ago
IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- raverbashing 6y ago
  But you don't. The mobile website works. Worse of the worse cases use Dabr.
  - heleninboodler 6y ago
    For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and the result is often that message that the page failed to load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't know how you can possibly do this badly at delivering what should be the smallest web pages ever. My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.) I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.
    - AndrewGaspar 6y ago
      I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.
      - heleninboodler 6y ago
        Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is basically unusable, and I see at least one other person in this thread mentioning the error that indicates requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.
        icedchai 6y ago
        If you try it on wifi, is it still slow?
        heleninboodler 6y ago
        Yes, as mentioned, it's regardless of what kind of connection I'm on.
        jen20 6y ago
        I find exactly the same thing with my iPhone too, and often on desktop via the web app. The SPA "loading" page will just spin indefinitely.
      - karatestomp 6y ago
        I get frequent failures for various reasons on multiple connection types, including Google Fiber. Referrer seems to be part of it. Mobile does seem much worse (WiFi or cell network) which makes it feel intentional.
  - mcintyre1994 6y ago
    If you do want notifications then at least on iOS the mobile website doesn’t cover that.
  - plorkyeran 6y ago
    The mobile website's been broken for me for something like a year. It just shows "Something went wrong" with a Try again button that doesn't do anything. This happens for me on two different iPhones (a 6S and a XS).
paxys 6y ago
In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.
- Felz 6y ago
  You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.
  - fasteo 6y ago
    >>> Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS Not my knowledge. SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents). From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS. Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.
    - Felz 6y ago
      It sounds like Amazon is adding quite a surcharge onto their SMS, then. https://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/
- ncallaway 6y ago
  > In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up. I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim "In _all_ such cases".
fastball 6y ago
I originally read your comment as "I'd have to second guess this" and I was very confused.
kevincox 6y ago
Are they serving ads over SMS? It seems like that is the biggest reason.

cassalian 6y ago

IMO the reasoning is more likely "you have to use our official app" rather than "text messages are expensive to send so let's discontinue"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 6y ago
But you don't. The mobile website works. Worse of the worse cases use Dabr.
- heleninboodler 6y ago
  For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and the result is often that message that the page failed to load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't know how you can possibly do this badly at delivering what should be the smallest web pages ever. My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.) I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.
  - AndrewGaspar 6y ago
    I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.
    - heleninboodler 6y ago
      Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is basically unusable, and I see at least one other person in this thread mentioning the error that indicates requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.
      - icedchai 6y ago
        If you try it on wifi, is it still slow?
        heleninboodler 6y ago
        Yes, as mentioned, it's regardless of what kind of connection I'm on.
        jen20 6y ago
        I find exactly the same thing with my iPhone too, and often on desktop via the web app. The SPA "loading" page will just spin indefinitely.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      I get frequent failures for various reasons on multiple connection types, including Google Fiber. Referrer seems to be part of it. Mobile does seem much worse (WiFi or cell network) which makes it feel intentional.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  If you do want notifications then at least on iOS the mobile website doesn’t cover that.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  The mobile website's been broken for me for something like a year. It just shows "Something went wrong" with a Try again button that doesn't do anything. This happens for me on two different iPhones (a 6S and a XS).

paxys 6y ago

In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else. So it's not cost per SMS that they are worried about, but rather the time spent maintaining and fixing these systems compared to how much they are used.

Felz 6y ago
You might not realize just how expensive SMSes can be. Based on AWS SMS pricing, they cost 6/10ths of a cent to US destinations each, so each deal sent to 90,000 people in the article would cost twitter $540. That's not even getting into Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS, but I doubt twitter supported that.
- fasteo 6y ago
  >>> Europe that can cost over 10 cents per SMS Not my knowledge. SMS prices in Europe varies from country to country, but I would say that they are, on average, around 3-4 cents. You have cheap countries like Portugal (1-2 cent), intermediate countries like Spain (2-3 cents) and France (3 cents) and expensive countries like Germany (6 cents) or Belgium (6 cents). From the top of me head, Azerbaijan is the most expensive country in the world, at 10 cents per SMS. Source: Running a SMS hub in Europe for the last 15 years.
  - Felz 6y ago
    It sounds like Amazon is adding quite a surcharge onto their SMS, then. https://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/
ncallaway 6y ago
> In all such cases the cost of engineering/operations time to keep these services alive overshadows pretty much everything else This is an extremely aggressive claim that I doubt holds up. I would absolutely agree with "In _many_ such cases", or "In _most_ such cases", but it's almost certainly false to claim "In _all_ such cases".

fastball 6y ago

I originally read your comment as "I'd have to second guess this" and I was very confused.

kevincox 6y ago

Are they serving ads over SMS? It seems like that is the biggest reason.