When are they going to get SMS enabled numbers in Canada?
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)
A thousand times this. One of my projects is SMS heavy, and I had to switch it to Tropo because Twilio wouldn't do Canadian numbers. The developer experience has been far inferior.
The developer experience isn't even the worst of it. Try running some reliability testing. It's mind blowing how bad Tropo is and how many random hidden variables exist in their system.
Which is really sad when you consider the problem. API accepts SMS and inserts into database; workers take queue from database and action against SMS gateways (works in reverse for messages going the other way).
I'm Diggz, Chief Evangelist at Tropo. I'm sorry you had a negative experience with Tropo. We're constantly improving our docs and services and would love to hear any feedback you have. I was recently made aware of your SMS load test with Canadian numbers and I believe with a couple of tweaks, we can get those SMS's cruising along.
For SMS-only apps that don't use voice or speech recognition, we also have http://SMSified.com which is a RESTful API based on the GSMA standard for SMS - launching in international beta soon (U.S only ATM).
International SMS is tricky (as most will agree) but we do have many devs and customers using our Tropo Canadian SMS service without performance issues. One of the reasons we don't charge developers to test on Tropo is because we know it takes time (and lots of testing) to make an app that your customers will be able to trust and rely upon. Feel free to email me at diggz at tropo dot com.
I definitely recognize that SMS is a tough problem, so I sympathize as an engineer. That being said, as a customer I don't care about any of that, I just want it to work.
Simple test: send more than 1 message from a phone number in the span of 15 seconds during a bulk test. At random Tropo will drop the second message because the first one hasn't gone through yet on your system. No error message, nothing, it just drops the data. I know why it does this, I've read the docs, but that's a crazy "feature"! why can't you queue it like Twilio does? that's just one example. Don't even get me started on your logging system. There's no sane way to get reports! none!
We looked at SMSified and even tried to use their Canadian numbers (somehow we got a few Canadian SMS enabled numbers even though we were told it's not supported.) That thing was basically unusable. Delivery rates of around 60%, with totally random inexplicable failures.
Twilio on the other hand has been awesome. No weirdness, very reasonable defaults, rock solid performance, good logs. Just very pleasant to use in general.
I appreciate the feedback and I also agree with you on several points. Tropo's logging today IS incredibly verbose and I've been working with our product dev team to filter it to make it more developer-friendly.
You are correct that Tropo does not have built-in queueing today and I also agree that it should at least let you know if it can't deliver a message.
Better reporting is also at the top of our list for the next rev.
Again, thanks for taking the time to give me your feedback. I think you'll be pleased to see these suggestions baked into the next version of Tropo. +) Diggz
I'd say pretty soon. They had a sign up for a canadian sms beta on their website a couple of weeks back. Our company got in; still a few bugs for them to work out, but it is a fantastic service!
Seeing that Eurpoean countries have a population in the range of Canada one might think Canada should rank well in the queue with european countries for Twilio attention.
I'm not sure what the hold up is either, I have an app in Twilio that's being held back by the Polite Canadians needing SMS and I can't get mad at them, and am having to consider moving everything to Tropo or something else... Tropo reviews thus far here don't seem encouraging.
I encourage you to try Tropo, we have thousands of very happy developers in our community and we're constantly absorbing feedback and baking it into our platform. Plus it's completely free for developers :)
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)