phones

That’s not the point. It’s to exploit missed opportunities; not to fill a quota. If there were a weather service, for example, I have no interest in asking for the weather 950 times and flooding my inbox.

For a bit more context, it’s packaged with data which always runs out before the end of the month & sometimes I have a bit of downtime before buying more data. So the downtime could perhaps be less annoying if SMS can give some connection to the world (apart from the obvious use).

The phone carrier itself has a somewhat sophisticated service with cascading menus all implemented in SMS, which then provides information about your account, options, and gives ways to place orders. So in principle anyone could implement that sort of thing. But the 2000s are over so maybe SMS has retracted back to just rare simple uses like buying bus fare.