I am trying to develop a web based SMS application and one of the features I would like to have is threaded group conversations.
Imagine there are 5 people, A, B, C, D, and E. 'A' is the person using the web application and 'B','C','D','E' are on their mobile phones.
I want to create two threads such as this:
A -> (B, C, D)
A -> (B, C, E)
And track those conversations so that person A can see a threaded conversation of those separate group chats.
One way that I know that I can do this is by using multiple twilio numbers but is there a way to do it without using multiple numbers? Is there a way to embed a key or ID in the messages that are sent/received? Twilio has cookie support but that seems to be limited to two person conversations and only works for conversations that are initiated outside the app.
I looked into Plivo and Nexmo but I don't think it's possible with them either.
Is this just a limitation of SMS or is it possible to do what I am trying to do?
SMS is stateless, and there's no way to tie two messages to each other (as a thread) other than match meta data (the pairing of a to / from).
For what you're trying to do, you'll need multiple virtual numbers, as this is limitation of SMS itself.