FrontlineSMS

» see frontlinesms.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

FrontlineSMS was a free Java program that turned a laptop and a mobile phone into a text message hub. You connected a handset or a GSM modem with a local number, and the software could send to groups, receive replies, filter them by keyword and fire off automatic responses. No server was involved and no internet connection was required, which was the entire design brief.

Ken Banks wrote the first version in 2005 for conservationists who needed to stay in contact with the communities living around Kruger National Park in South Africa. The later 2.0 release was a deep redesign that put a browser interface in front of the same Java backend, and a hosted version followed for organizations that did have reliable connectivity.

The use it got was not small. In April 2007 the Network of Mobile Election Monitors ran reports from polling stations in the Nigerian general election through it. In 2009 it was paired with Ushahidi to map reports during the Afghan presidential election. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, team members helped set up messaging in the response, and the FrontlineSMS:Medic branch of the project was already running clinic networks in Malawi.

~ the record ~

~ what it ran against ~

This is software built for the assumption that the mobile network is the only infrastructure that reaches a place. That assumption never applied where I live. Turkey had cheap SMS and near total GSM coverage by the mid 2000s, and texting here was a consumer habit rather than a way of reaching a clinic that had no road to it.

The economics followed the same logic. The desktop program was free and open source, so the organizations using it in the field paid nothing for the software and paid their own carriers for the messages. The company made its money from the hosted product and from service work, and said it had been self-sustaining on that for its last seven years.

~ the closing letter ~

On 28 June 2021 a post went up on the company blog titled "Frontline is Closing". It opens flatly: "We are closing the company behind FrontlineSMS. We are sad to close the business, but we're thankful to have had the runway to close on our own timeline and to take good care of our team." The cloud-hosted service would be switched off on 31 August 2021, and existing clients had already been contacted.

The part worth quoting is the reason, because it is one almost nobody gives. "But we also want you to know: this was the team's choice. We have the pipeline and runway to keep going. We are choosing to stop." The letter goes on to say that one motive was to argue with the industry's definition of success, since companies "do not need to be large, or go on forever, to succeed", after fifteen years and users in 200 countries.

~ in perpetuity ~

The closure came with a plan for the software. Frontline spent its last two years rebuilding the product to release it as a free desktop download, with the code on GitHub and the documentation in Zendesk, and the letter promised that frontlinesms.com would stay up "in perpetuity" to host all of it. By January 2022 the website had shrunk to exactly that: a single page with three download links and a line saying the code was coming soon.

frontlinesms.com no longer resolves. The DNS is gone, so there is nothing to time out against, and the archived captures stop a few years after the promise was made.

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