Cosmos emerged out of a 36-hour hackaton session by
four college and high-school students in the US. Here’s
how it works: when you enter a URL in the address
bar, Cosmos sends it via SMS to a web service made
with Twilio and Node.JS, which loads up the website
content, removes any CSS, scripts, and images,
archives the minified version and sends it back to the
device via one or more text messages. The app
intercepts the messages, reassembles the content, and
displays the requested web page. Because all the
communication goes through SMS, there’s no need for
a data connection.
As promised, the team behind Cosmos managed to
bring a working app to the Play Store in less than a
month. The devs warn that there are some bugs, as
the app and backend system are still very basic. And,
due to the limits of the cloud infrastructure, you may
find that the app can’t serve the sites you requested,
especially if they are large.
For now, Cosmos seems to be restricted to US users,
probably to avoid overloading the infrastructure.
However, the app could have a far bigger impact in the
developing world, where wireless internet coverage is
spotty at best. Here’s hoping that more international
coverage will be coming soon.
SOURCE: Cosmos,
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