Send submissions via SMS

I would argue that Sending forms via SMS has lots of applications, although it may be very expensive in some areas.

There are many remote areas without WiFi signal coverage and only can send a message if people want to submit their forms.And we all know that ODK Collect aims to collect data in some special fields such as wildlife surveys or diseases investigation in some remote areas. So the SMS feature will be very useful in these cases.

Besides, I think ODK Collect mainly contained two parts:

  • Data collection

  • Data transmission

Data collection works basically without network in local devices.Data transmission was related to both local devices and remote servers.Transferring data via SMS or Bluetooth, NFC and other approaches they all have advantages and disadvantages ,so we can categorize them into probably two kinds:

  1. Communicate in short distance ( NFC and Bluetooth and WiFi-P2P)

  2. Communicate in whatever distance ( WiFi and SMS )

So we can create an option-menu for users to choose ,they can decide which approach may work better in this case.The option-menu contains two options ( short-distance mode or long-distance mode) ,and if there exists WiFi signal, we can use WiFi-P2P in short-distance mode or WiFi to server in long-distance mode automatically. If no WiFi available,they can use SMS if they need a remote commit.Anyway, those details can be discussed later.

But we have to make sure our APP can deliver these data to individuals and servers successfully.
What's your opinion about that ?