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It's ridiculous to not send mms messages by default.

richwoodrocket

richwoodrocket

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 7, 2014
2,133
112
Buffalo, NY
One area where Apple really falls behind android phones is sending text messages. Yes I realize there's iMessage, and I love iMessage, but not everybody has an iphone, and I have a few friends that don't have iPhones.
When I want to send my friend with an android phone a message, I either have to keep it really short, or go to settings, messages, then turn on show subject field and put a space in the subject field to send the message as an mms. I think this is so stupid that the iphone doesn't automatically send them as mms messages. I don't see any disadvantages to this, as I don't want to annoy my friend with sending 6 sms messages, when he could instead just receive one mms message. Android does this automatically, so why can't Apple? Is this part of apples push to get everybody on the iphone? Probably.
I'd be a whole lot happier if Apple had an option to send messages as mms by default. The 160 character limit in this day and age is ridiculous. I'm texting somebody, not using Twitter. There shouldnt be be an insane character limit.
Am I the only one with the problem?
 
I don't understand. Mms like pictures n video? I send those all the time to non ios phones. You can turn off iMessage.
 
I don't don't know about the U.S. But in the UK mms message are not usually included in your monthly tariff. I get unlimited sms text messages, but mms messages are 20p a message.

I have mms turned off.

If I want to send texts that include pictures etc to non iPhones I would use whatsapp.
 
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AlliFlowers said:
The 160 character limit was set when SMS was created. The two Ms in MMS stand for MultiMedia. If all you're doing is sending lengthy texts, why not send an email? They'll arrive just as fast, and can be as verbose as you want.
Click to expand...
Email doesn't work so good for instant messaging.
 
Truefan31 said:
I don't understand. Mms like pictures n video? I send those all the time to non ios phones. You can turn off iMessage.
Click to expand...
Text can be sent in an mms. The limit is extremely high. Much higher than sms. Android sends mms instead of sms when there are more than 160 characters. I can receive these lengthy messages, but not send them unless I enable the subject field and put a space in there.
 
I thought phones these days were good at parsing those sms messages together? Sticking them into one? Or maybe that's not the case in the US?

Personally I wouldn't want my phoning automatically sending MMS. I usually turn off mobile data when I'm at home, plus here in the UK most networks charge extra for sending MMS (something like 30p per MMS) that would soon rack up quickly!
 
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richwoodrocket said:
Text can be sent in an mms. The limit is extremely high. Much higher than sms. Android sends mms instead of sms when there are more than 160 characters. I can receive these lengthy messages, but not send them unless I enable the subject field and put a space in there.
Click to expand...

OP, the iPhone actually can do the same exact thing that the android's phones can do in this circumstance. I just tested it out with my own phone. I turned off iMessages in settings (while doing so, noticed that there is a setting for SMS/MMS below, which is turned on) - then sent myself a text message that was well over 1000 characters (basically pasted an essay) and sent it. I received a preview of the message (the first 9 lines) which had an arrow in the bottom right corner. When you press the arrow, it opens up as an image; which is the MMS part. So it does just what you described android phones to do. I used to have an android phone so I remember MMS's...and this is just that.

seble said:
I thought phones these days were good at parsing those sms messages together? Sticking them into one? Or maybe that's not the case in the US?
Click to expand...

You are correct.
 
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Why is SMS still default? Because there are still people out there who have dumb phones that can't handle text MMS messages well. My mom just traded in her EnV 3 for an iPhone 5s just a few months ago. She'd complained last Christmas about getting garbled texts. When I had a BlackBerry Storm 2 back in 2011 it handled group MMS messages really weirdly. Phones are getting smarter, but the backward compatibility of communication is getting harder and harder.
 
My email is pretty much instant, plus I can go more than 160 characters and attach pics, docs, etc.
I use both Microsoft / Gmail, they're pretty much instant.
You may need to reevaluate your tools that you use to do work.
 
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I seem to recall iPhones always being able to send extremely long SMS messages even before iMessage came out. Sounds like an Android issue where it needs to be broken up or converted to MMS.
 
I still get SMS out of order from android users who send me wall of texts. I have no idea what they're talking about until they all come in 10 min later and I piece them together.
 
KUguardgrl13 said:
Why is SMS still default? Because there are still people out there who have dumb phones that can't handle text MMS messages well. My mom just traded in her EnV 3 for an iPhone 5s just a few months ago. She'd complained last Christmas about getting garbled texts. When I had a BlackBerry Storm 2 back in 2011 it handled group MMS messages really weirdly. Phones are getting smarter, but the backward compatibility of communication is getting harder and harder.
Click to expand...

MMS cost 40p each on my contract in the UK. I can send unlimited texts. For me an MMS is only ever an option if I want to send a photo or a MEME, but I would email it instead due to the 40p charge. What's the fuss here? Send an SMS, send an email, send an iMessage, use Whatsapp or switch to Android if none of these options are floating your boat.
 
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Perhaps the problem is carrier specific. I got text msg from people and sometime the text is broken up into multiple messages. I was curious but never bothered enough to check.
 
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The iPhone sends concatenated SMS messages for lengthier texts, but I guess some phones don't handle that as well. Advantage to using MMS would be using fewer messages, but in the US where everyone has unlimited texts now, it doesn't really make a difference.
 
There's also the carrier part in all of this. Various carriers support EMS, which are long text messages basically, and will automatically use that if you type a longer message. But, the carrier has to do support that, and I guess the phones have to be capable of it as well.
 
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C DM said:
There's also the carrier part in all of this. Various carriers support EMS, which are long text messages basically, and will automatically use that if you type a longer message. But, the carrier has to do support that, and I guess the phones have to be capable of it as well.
Click to expand...

That's true. I remember my pre-smart phone would automatically send a 161+ character message as an MMS. However if the message was going to the same carrier, it would send it as an SMS but it would be stitched together as a long SMS (longer than 160 characters). For other carriers they would receive it in split messages. This is old school stuff though. Not sure if that's even the case anymore, but it probably is; thus MMS being the only way to do it on android.
 
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