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MIT App Inventor Public Open Source
http://appinventor.mit.edu/appinventor-sources/
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Rapidly sending an image plus a text in a text message in an app is currently impossible #2963

Open stezelMIT opened 1 year ago

stezelMIT commented 1 year ago

Describe the desired feature

One of the most powerful apps that should be be buildable very quickly is an "Emergency App" where the user encountering a threatening situation could send to all their pre-chosen emergency contacts a pre-written text ("I am in danger, please help"), a photo of the situation they snap, along with their GPS location (and ideally also an exact address but address locator in App Inventor has not worked since 2018 when I joined the team, not sure why.) If I recall correctly Dharavi girls tried to develop such an app for women's safety concerns in India etc.

Currently it is impossible to do all this with the touch of a few buttons. You can do this with the Sharing component but it is not possible to automatically chose the social media application to be used and pre-populate the receiver field, making it practically unusable in an emergency context.

Such a powerful Emergency App would be an amazing way of convincing people of the immense usefulness and relevance of App Inventor as it would directly confront and aim to bring solution to a primal fear that everyone experiences.

Give an example of how this feature would be used As Ed Team we would add this to the list of app building exercises we do in workshops etc. right after the Hour of Code basics. It would help convince many people of App Inventor's relevance and power.

Why doesn't the current App Inventor system address this use case? Not sure what the technical issues are.

Sharing component is the only way to merge an image and a text in a message to be sent and because the process does not pre-populate receiver fields etc. it is painfully slow.

Why is this feature beneficial to App Inventor's educational mission? Safety is a concern for everyone all over the world, showing a capability in App Inventor for anyone to build an app for their safety will have profound psychological effect and computational action impact.

PeterMathijssen commented 1 year ago

Hi Selim,

This works for me with sending an SMS and the coordinates of my location with the current adress.

image

Sending for instance via Telegram, Signal or Whatsapp is most of the time not possible because of restrictions made by the app developers. I think the easiest way is sending an SMS.

stezelMIT commented 1 year ago

Thanks Peter, It is interesting that LocationSensor.CurrentAddress works for you. I have not been able to get it working on any of my devices. Maybe the emphasis was not clear from my writing above but the real issue I filed is that you cannot send an IMAGE AND a TEXT at the same time in a text message. Texting component does not have a block that accepts a file along with a text message like the Sharing component.

PeterMathijssen commented 1 year ago

Sending an SMS is the easiest thing to do. Else you could send an MMS but I don't know if each provider still supports that. An MMS has the ability of sending text and images. https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

PeterMathijssen commented 1 year ago

In a lot of areas there could be bad internet connectivity. So using Whatsapp or others are not usable. That's why SMS and MMS are a better choice in my opinion. In my app I made it so that if someone goes into a more "dangerous" area they press the button on the screen. As soon as they let go the SMS is send and an alarm sound goes off.

ewpatton commented 1 year ago

MMS is just done over HTTP, so effectively it still requires decent internet access. SMS is sent on the back of the cellular messages so would be more reliable but is limited to 160 characters (although these days I think it will break larger messages down and send it in multiple packets to be reconstructed later). If you want fast, images are not going to be your friend because images are big.

There is a larger question that we have to be weary of which is whether we as MIT want to be saying that App Inventor is capable of building this app reliably and what type of liability that creates for us if we publish a tutorial on how to do this and someone is harmed if it doesn't work.

stezelMIT commented 1 year ago

oh, excellent points gentlemen.