What can you do with a Twilio phone number?
Developers can use the numbers they get from us in a number of ways. However, the two core products that address the majority of Twilio's use cases are voice and messaging.
Imagine a simple application to illustrate our examples philippines mobile number example : a basic weather application that allows customers to request the current weather and receive an automatic message every morning with the expected weather for the day.
Receiving messages: what's the weather like?
In this first example, we want people to text their location to our weather app, so we can respond with the weather forecast.
We call this a carrier-initiated event . This message is transmitted from a person's phone to the carrier. The carrier does a lookup (much like looking at websites on the Internet) to see who owns the recipient's phone number. In this case, the carrier will see that Twilio owns the number. This message is then routed to Twilio via a protocol called SMPP, the Text Message Protocol.
Twilio receives the message from the operator via a dedicated connection between them. The message then arrives in Twilio's messaging processing stack where it has software written to receive and interpret that message.
At this point, Twilio can recognize the phone number that should receive the message and looks to see if that number has been configured with a messaging URL. The URL points to the application endpoint that will handle incoming messages.
Twilio then makes a request to the application. This is called a webhook.
The webhook is an HTTP request containing the details of the message sent to the customer's phone number. With the information in the request, the customer's application can decide how it wants to handle the SMS and, if it wants, provide a response to Twilio on how to proceed.