Disposable phone numbers for iPhone and Android

Burner URL Scheme

Added on by William Carter.

When we released version 1.4 of Burner last week, we included a hidden but powerful new feature.  Developers can now use our Burner URL scheme to create phone numbers, access an existing number, call or sms from a known number, or simply deep link to a Burner's detail page from their own iOS or mobile apps.

Integrating Burner functionality into an existing app is trivial.  We have written and documented a full end-to-end example which you can check out here .  This sample app allows users the ability to check into a location on Foursquare and append a Burner number to the check-in.  Once checked-in, the app allows the user to place calls or send sms messages with that number, or view that number's details.

To grab a number from Burner, simply open the following url:

burner://create

to create a new burner number to use.  You can also pass a [areacode] or [name] parameter to the url to specify those details for the Burner number.

or

burner://choose

to choose an existing number. You'll probably want to pass in a [redirect] parameter like

burner://choose?redirect=[url]

In this scenario, you'd open the burner URL like so:

NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://choose?redirect=%@", @"your_app_url_scheme"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];

After grabbing a number, Burner will redirect back to your app with the number in the "burner" param: 

your_app_url_scheme://something?burner=13238675309

which you can parse out, store, or really do anything with.  You can even initiate a phone call or an sms message with the Burner number by doing something like

NSString *sms_url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://sms?burner=%@", @"13238675309"];
NSString *call_url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"burner://sms?burner=%@", @"13238675309"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:call_url]];

That's it!  Easy, right?  Check out BurnSquare on github for implementation details and sample code and keep watching this space for more Burner integration tips and tricks in the future.