In the Messages app, next to the text field, there is a camera icon.

:D well, _that_ implies iMessage and/or MMS I guess.

As I said, nobody in central Europe uses that afaik.

I have a TCL flip phone (alongside an iPhone 8): can text a flip phone photo by going to photo gallery, selecting a photo, going to “options” and then “share”. Message then becomes an option and an MMS text is possible.

This isn’t one size fits all but would start by going to the photo itself and then generate a text

How do you send a message to someone's phone number, then? Or do you somehow not use phone numbers anymore?

We mostly use Whatsapp or Signal, which both use phone numbers for account identification/verification.

I am surprised again and again how different the US and Europa are in this respect, and even more about how little people are aware of that. Nobody uses iMessage outside of the US, and the UI of Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram are arguably much better.

It's nearly universal parlance in the USA to call MMS and SMS 'texts'. They are shown and treated as the same thing by the phone OS. I wouldn't expect the average layperson to even know there's a difference.

I'm honestly surprised that's not the case everywhere. Do you distinguish SMS and MMS in casual conversation?

Afaik nobody uses MMS in central Europe. Depending on the carrier it is not even supported anymore, and has been very expensive before that. Virtually everyone switched to Whatsapp ten years ago.

Weird. I don't know anyone who uses WhatsApp or similar in the US. MMS is well supported and usually billed the same as SMS these days (AFAIK).

I just moved to the USA from Europe and have found sms/mms to be annoying. I'm consistently missing texts especially mms. Maybe my settings are slightly off or the payload is exceeding MMS size limits but it's way less reliable than Whatsapp. Everyone seems to use iPhones so they don't hit this issue until they text an android user like me.