Group MMS sending as text message?

[merkhet]

I have an existing group MMS with two friends who are both on iPhones.

I have upgraded to iOS 8. The other two have not.

For some reason, when I'm on my iPhone, and I try to respond to those two, it sends as a text message rather than an MMS.

Sending a reply on my MacBook Air or my iPad works fine as an MMS.

What's going on here?

 

[tzual]

Had the same problem on iOS 8 GM a couple days ago. Just delete the conversation thread and start a new one with the same people. Should resolve the problem.

 

[Devlonc]

same thing happened to me. just deleted new text came in from group as imessage

 

[PLin]

I have this problem too, but I'm not willing to delete the thread, because it contains years of business-related talk between my business partners and employees. I'm also on AT&T's grandfathered 200 text plan, so I can't participate in a group MMS, because I'll use up all of my texts in no time.

I've tried everything to get the iPhone to recognize that all members of the conversation are using iMessage, but nothing works. I know that iMessage is working for all of the recipients, because I can create a new conversation and add one additional person, and I have no problem sending it as an iMessage.

One partial workaround I found at least reply via iMessage to is to create a new conversation with all the same recipients but then add myself as a recipient too. The iPhone thinks it's a new conversation, but it gets delivered to the other recipients. The only problem is that my reply doesn't show up in the main conversation history.

This is clearly a bug in iOS 8 that prevents the iPhone from checking the iMessage status of the recipients prior to sending.

 

[JeffNT326]

I still have this issue. I hope you guys found a fix, but it seems to be pretty wide-spread with no easy, consequence-free solutions.

I'm hoping 8.1 will fix the issue.

Apparently it has something to do with the way Apple issues iMessage encryption keys.

Here are a couple of threads on Apple's forums that address this issue:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6537348
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6537938

 

[crazyninja]

I've had this issue as well. I know many friends and family that have also.

There have also been times when it is sent as an iMessage but then some of the intended recipients do not receive anything at all. It shows on my phone that I have sent the message as iMessage, but it never comes up on their phone.

I don't like the idea of having to delete a thread and starting it over to make it use iMessage. I don't like how so many Apple products now rely on this iCloud message system that no longer seems reliable. Do we know that this issue will be addressed in 8.1?