Do phone numbers really cost anything in the US? Or is there an upper limit to the length of a phone number? Otherwise, they can just allocate a million which would be enough to have a grace period of at least a year until phone numbers would be reused.
All phone numbers in the US (actually, North America and some Caribbean islands) are the form AAA-XXX-YYYY, and there's a finite number of AAA (or area codes) that have been issued so far. And some types of numbers are not possible, mostly for historic reasons. I'm not sure how much a block of numbers actually cost in the US, but they're not free. I know a company I worked for tried hard to compress the range of numbers they had so they could give back part of an exchange to save money.
Not sure why this is anything special. AAISP in the UK sell SIP phone numbers for £1.20 per month (http://www.aaisp.co.uk/telecoms-prices.html), they take about 10 seconds to set up, and I can use them trivially from my Android phone. Surely it's much the same in the US?
We had this back in the 80's. It was called just calling someone with your phone. Because there was no caller id.
I remember when a group of girls called me, not saying who they were, and trying to trick me into meeting them out on the track at night at school, where they surely would not have been. OH, anonymous fun. :(
not sure, but as a wp user that made me sort of happy - probably the first time i've seen that on hn..
my guess would be ease of porting, though that's purely a guess. i am though starting to notice an increase in the number of same-day releases for wp as ios, and in some cases (like disney games recently) ahead of android.
though still small, i really think the platform's gotten to the point where it makes sense for devs to at least consider it, especially as many times the effort to port from ios is sufficiently small to justify the work.
