At least in the UK, group messaging over sms was always broken, and sending pictures still costs me extra money. The phone carriers brought it on themselves.
Sorry, but group chat over SMS is crap. Lots of Android phones as well don’t operate group SMS well, you get reduced resolution in photos and videos, can’t like/heart messages in the same way, no typing indicators, etc etc. Losing iMessage features sucks when you’re otherwise used to it.
I don't know about that. I remember back in the nineties we were all using SMS in England. Pretty much all my friends had a mobile, and we treated SMS like social media DMs.
By the time I message became big it was a non issue. SMS is a garbage standard in comparison. I send full pictures and movies via I message if there is a Android phone on the chat they all turn to garbage tiny images
I'm in the US. I started using MMS quite a bit in 2003, about the time I got my first 3G phone. It was quite handy for sending photos with family, and I had several friends who also could receive MMS without issue. At the time the carriers in the area counted MMS messages the same as SMS messages, so if you had a texting plan you usually could also use MMS at no extra cost. Thus it was easy to share photos from our early camera phones with each other, before Facebook or Whatsapp even existed. And then when Facebook did exist but before using a Facebook app was a thing you could upload photos to things like Facebook through MMS gateways as well. Most of the original photos I uploaded to Facebook were things uploaded from a camera phone through MMS messages as it was quite easy to do.
I used to use the MMS email gateway a decent bit as well. It made it really easy to get notifications for things before I got a Symbian phone with IMAP on it and could just use my regular email on the go. I still get some notifications through the MMS gateway from some services.
I still use MMS a decent bit. Its still the least common denominator between everyone I know for group messaging, and for the most part is a somewhat seamless experience between Android phones, iPhones, and non-smartphones. I do tend to do most of my messaging through an app, but probably 10% of my messages still go through SMS/MMS these days for those people who I don't have an overlapping app with, usually because they only use iMessage or they don't have a smartphone.
You probably haven't had to use it very much, then. I've been using for as long, and it took so many of those years just to be able to finally receive pictures and group texts. (I think those two have only really worked for a year or two now.) When group messaging was broken, it was really broken; I missed out on conversation entirely, or received the messages such that each participant had their own individual thread.
And even today, I still often find situations where I have a new voicemail despite my phone never ringing. I even check the call log on my phone and nothing ever came in.
The MMS updates and this new suite of UIs are definitely welcome additions if you ask me, and hopefully indicative that the service isn't circling the drain after all (which I've been anticipating for some time now).
if you say "group messages" here in the UK, everybody will assume you are talking about whatsapp, or blackberry messenger (before)
one of the reasons why I suspect MMS went completely unnoticed here in the UK is that Blackberry was extremely popular rather early, and then Android ate it
I don't think I've ever sent a single group message over MMS
Telegram, Signal and Whatsapp have tools for handling tens or hundreds of people in a group. (Telegram more than the others).
Also, everyone here has (near)unlimited data, so using a non-SMS communication tool is free. SMS have either a flat budget (1k SMS per month) or cost per message.
Oh, and sending pictures/videos over plain SMS is just horrible.
I'd be socially ostracized if I started with SMS groups every time I wanted to have a group chat via phone without first having to convince everyone involved to install some new app on their phone or get everyone's email beforehand, which would basically be the alternative today.
> Personally I’d hate it if my cousin sent me her vacation pictures by email,
That's kind of the point. People didn't hate this before Facebook. Now it's become the only socially acceptable medium of communication for many occasions.
I think people first moved away from SMS because it cost extra to send them, while messaging apps were virtually free. Then messaging apps beat SMS on features, you can send photos, videos, files, read receipts, works across platforms, etc.
MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.
So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.
I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.
I've experienced this first hand, even as an adult (well 20 something). I'd be left out of group chats because MMS breaks everything. I'd even missed events because it was all planned in the group chat, and assumed someone would mention it in person to me.
This comes down to having distinct synchronous and asynchronous communication platforms. Back in the day you has email for async and aol/msn/icq for sync. On top of that they were only on your computer, and most people had desktops, you had to physically be at your computer to use them. The joy of sitting there chatting away with friends while doing homework or playing games was brilliant.
On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up.
Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text.
Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that.
(I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)
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