TextNet Browser is an Android app that allows anyone around the world to browse the web without a mobile data connection! It uses SMS as a medium of transmitting HTTP requests to a server where a pre-parsed HTML response is compressed using Google's Brotli compression algorithm and encoded using a custom Base-114 encoding format (based on Basest).
In addition, any user can act as a server using their own phone's primary phone number and a Wi-Fi/data connection at the press of a button, allowing for peer-to-peer distributed networks.
Welcome to TxtNet Browser!
TxtNet Browser APK With this app, you can view web pages and submit web forms without an internet connection.
To begin, enter a URL in the above address bar and press the magnifying glass icon or enter button to proceed.
Other App Features
Options
TxtNet Browser APK The options section of this app houses 2 major functions. Primarily, you can delete message history with the server once a large amount of web data has been stored. Secondly, you can choose to block incoming message notifications from the server to improve your experience with the app. We recommend that first-time users block the number that they wish to use in the app. To accomplish this, press the three dots in the top right of your screen and choose “Options.”
IMPORTANT: In order to Block, Unblock, or Delete Message History, Android requires that this app be registered as the default SMS app beginning with Android 5.0. To accomplish this, choose “Set Default SMS” in Options. When you are done, press the button again to revert to your previous Messaging app.
Select Server Phone Number
The server phone number selection screen can be found from the overflow menu (3 dots) to the right of the search bar. In this menu, you can add new server phone numbers by pressing on the plus (+) icon, select a default phone number by tapping it, and delete a phone number by swiping left on the number's cell and selecting "Delete".
TxtNet Server Hosting
TxtNet Browser empowers users to utilize their own Wi-Fi or Cellular Data connection to act as a server to other users who can connect to you through the phone number associated with your default SIM. To enable this functionality, users on Android 4.4-10 must run two adb commands once by connecting their phone to a computer over USB. On Android 11+, users may opt instead to install the Shizuku app through the Google Play store. The "Number of Webviews" refers to the amount of concurrent web requests allowed from multiple users. "Max outgoing SMS per request" specifies how many SMS messages are allowed to be sent resulting from a single web page request. A website with lots of text can exceed this limit, in which case a failure message will be sent instead.
TxtNet Browser 2.1.4 Latest
- Hotfix: Malformed input URLs can lead to WebViews to not rejoin the available queue, causing resource starvation.
- Affects: TxtNet Server, all versions
- TxtNet Client is unaffected.
How it works (client)
This app uses a permission that allows a broadcast receiver to receive and parse incoming SMS messages without the need for the app to be registered as the user's default messaging app. While granting an app SMS permissions poses a security concern, the code for this app is open source and all code involving the use of internet permissions are compartmentalized to the server module. This ensures that unless the app is setup to be a server, no internet traffic is transmitted. In addition, as the client, SMS messages are only programmatically sent to and received from a registered server phone number. The app communicates with a "server phone number", which is a phone number controlled by a "server host" that communicates directly over SMS using Android's SMS APIs. Each URL request is sent, encoded in a custom base 114, to the server. Usually, this only requires 1 SMS, but just in case, each message is prepended with an order specifier. When the server receives a request, the server uses an Android WebView component to programmatically request the website in a manner that simulates a regular request, to avoid restrictions some services (such as Cloud flare) place on HTTP clients. By doing this, any JavaScript can also execute on the website, allowing content to be dynamically loaded into the HTML if needed. Once the page is loaded, only the HTML is transferred back to the recipient device. The HTML is stripped of unnecessary tags and attributes, compressed into raw bytes, and then encoded. Once encoded, the messages are split into 160 character numbered segments (maximizing the GSM-7 standard SMS size) and sent to the client app for parsing and displaying.
