Slightly off topic, but I'm curious why the lack of MMS is a show-stopper for you. Personally I've always found it to be a waste of time and money; there's better and cheaper ways of transferring both text and images (especially images due to the compression).
Obviously you do have a use-case; please don't think I'm trying to say it's invalid, I just honestly don't understand what it would be and would really like to be enlightened.
I'm from the U.S. and everyone I know uses SMS/MMS to communicate, including a few MMS group messages. Practically no one I know uses whatsapp/telegram/etc.
Does MMS make it easy to have a group conversation, or does everyone have to remember to do the equiv or "reply-all" (add everyone's number in) when sending a message to the group?
Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
- Most MMS/SMS apps treat a MMS group as a threaded conversation, so you only have to set it up once (or it’ll automatically populate all the numbers when someone sends you a text from a mms group)
- MMS has been free and unlimited for the last decade or so on most major carriers (maybe more like ~7 years but we got it waaay before unlimited data made a comeback).
- Data comes standard most of the time, most people have at least a gig or two a month, going all the way up to unlimited. It’s not a problem of data use (since you’d be hard pressed to burn through two gigs of text and meh resolution images), but it’s that MMS is a lowest common denominator. Everyone has it, so you know you can reach them (except for the 10% of the time a message doesn’t go through and you don’t know about it :P). I’m in the US, and I don’t know anyone who uses something other than MMS or iMessage (which is invisible and acts exactly the same) for most of their communication. Some of us have Discord but we only use it on desktop. I think my parents may use Facebook Messenger for something.
Really appreciate the reply - thank you. It's always intriguing to see how the other half lives, as it were.
MMS never seemed to catch on in the UK and never seems to be included in the free allowances which probably doesn't help (eg I have unlimited calls, sms, >100gb data but MMS still costs me 50p each). I think the only time I've seen it used in years is very occasionally when I ask an iPhone user to send me a photo and they don't realise I'm on Android and won't automatically have it funnelled via Apple, so instead I get badly compressed unreadable photos of printed letters.
I think part of the reason it caught on here (US) is that it's been included with the plans for so long and as such is considered baseline functionality. You don't know if someone you're talking to will be on WhatsApp, Signal, etc but in the US you can pretty much assume the person you're talking to can receive MMS.
...until you can't, as this thread shows. This is also part of what's keeping me from using my PinePhone as a daily driver.
I think most people my age (22) in the US use Facebook Messenger. It’s certainly how I do most of my communication.
Facebook Messenger is like iMessage except you can generally assume everyone is on it. The main caveat is that you get the best experience if everyone is friends on Facebook, so it works great for friend/family convos but poorly for stuff like online dating (mostly SMS, Snapchat, and iMessage) and coordinating loosely attached groups of people (GroupMe used to be popular for this, but I haven’t seen it in awhile, iMessage also gets used for this but strongly excludes half of all people).
> Does MMS make it easy to have a group conversation, or does everyone have to remember to do the equiv or "reply-all" (add everyone's number in) when sending a message to the group?
It depends on the client, but yes, MMS makes it pretty easy to go.
> Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Most common plans that I know of have unlimited SMS/MMS/Phone calls (unless you get a really cheap one).
> Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
Data is generally standard with a plan. SOme only give you a limited allotment, and some give you some version of "unlimited" (i.e. if you use too much they will start to throttle you).
>Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
I have a phone plan with a Sprint reseller that costs $6/month and still have unlimited texts. It's really rare for a plan to not include unlimited SMS, unless maybe it's prepaid.
> Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
It was for a long time, and still is with some services. I used a tracphone flip-phone for a while, and a single SMS is like half a minute of phone time IIRC.
Because I'm a grump, I stuck with google voice for years specifically because it didn't support MMS. It cut down on a lot of spam from my family. I did manage to push people to email for group conversations. SMS/MMS are interrupts where email has a some what built in understanding that replies will not be immediate.
Obviously you do have a use-case; please don't think I'm trying to say it's invalid, I just honestly don't understand what it would be and would really like to be enlightened.