it is in fact a technical limitation.
I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone.
If you're unable to send files that large from an iPhone there's a carrier issue in play.
How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?
How does Apple get around that MMS limitation?
Since you’ve never used an iPhone, let me explain the experience. When you type in a random new number it starts off green. If the user uses iMessage, once you finish typing it magically turns blue. Apple doesn’t care about whether the other number is an Android phone per se, although if it’s not using iMessage then it’s almost certain that the number routes to an android phone.
because they were sending to an iPhone
I really love how folks are frothing at the mouth over things they don't understand.
Are you sending that to another iPhone?
It's completely broken.
Apple wants to force Android users into iPhones so that their tect messages stop sucking, as if it's and Android issue.
> Repeat after me: Poor MMS implementations are not Apple limitations.
Except that some of my family cannot send me a text on my Android phone because iOS absolutely refuses to treat it as anything other than an iMessage. Their contact for me does not have my iMessage/iCloud email. My iMessage/iCloud account has had my phone number deregistered from it. However, their iPhones cannot send me a text. It always sends it as an iMessage, even on threads where I send a text from my Android phone. Any reply just goes straight back to iMessage.
There are plenty of instances where Apple just does not care about text messages and protocols and will refuse to treat them properly. It is absolutely anti-competitive. They have been taken to court over this, which is why there is even a website that allows you to deregister your number. You used to have to use your iPhone to do it, which isn't exactly convenient if you lose or steal it. If you switched to Android, there was no way to get a text message from an iOS device while your number was registered with iMessage.
Now try sending to an at&t iPhone.
By your experience it seems that Apple is limiting iOS-iOS image size, to promote iMessage
If you sent an h.264 for instance, many flip phones would be unable to play it. So I think the MMS standard itself is holding us back.
I still blame Apple. If they prioritized the experience of their own customers above the value of the blue bubble in getting teens to bully Android users they could have obviously been the ones pushing a good RCS implementation with carriers by threatening credibly to drop MMS support. Instead they left it to carriers and Google who each screwed things up pretty well.
if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a
different name would've have replaced MMS by now.
Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.
If you want to interact with the RCS world as a non-wireless carrier, expect to pay upwards of 10 cents a message and have a minimum revenue commit of thousands of dollars a month. Carriers also don't get paid for inbound texts on RCS, creating a huge new cost center instead of symmetrical texting volume resulting in minimal costs like the current SMS/MMS ecosystem.
The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements).
Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.
I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.
All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies.
* Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph
In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability.
Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number.
It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.
Start with brownouts, make them more frequent, and in a few months we could all be off that whole mess. There'd be some chaos for a bit, but future generations would look back and wonder why we clung to this antiquated pile of wires for so long.
It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.
If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.
You can already see this type of fraudulent traffic occur on Telegram with the constant crypto bots and on Signal with the romance scams.
A PSTN sunset would force this fraudulent traffic to migrate to the over the top communications platforms, eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably, destroy reliable voice quality on cellular networks as there's no consistent way to prioritize third party voice and video traffic.
We've had SSL on the web for 30 years now. We don't visit our bank's web site and wonder if we're really talking to our bank, but we casually accept that of course someone calling from our bank's phone number could be a fraudster. There might be some fraud that is able to migrate, but it wouldn't be the smorgasbord for fraudsters that the legacy phone system has created.
> eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably
This is like saying that we can't put out the dumpster fire because it provides some people with warmth. The 911 system (at least in the US) is already a travesty. Caller locations are a crapshoot for wireless calls. Call centers aren't centralized, standardized, or coordinated, and they're overloaded. The technology is outdated. Moving it off the phone network and onto a centralized digital platform would be a massive improvement.
What TLS does do is ensure that when I communicate with a third party on the internet, that communication can't be intercepted by any intervening switches or routers. TLS per se does not have any other properties. However, we've constructed a system of chains of trust using TLS certificates and trusted third parties. That system is not a technical system and TLS does not have the innate property of enabling you to trust or not to trust someone.
It's an important distinction because the PSTN and our system of TLS Certificate Authorities is a social solution to a social problem. And so suggesting that TLS somehow magically has a property that it prevents fraud is hard for me to follow, because fraud is also a social problem and you can't use technology to solve social problems. Technology can be used to lubricate, to bring people together, and to ensure that conventions are followed and that peoples' solutions can interoperate. But the real innovation in TLS from a fraud perspective is actually the network of companies, nonprofits, third parties, and government agencies who have collectively established root Certificate Authorities and who have ensured that those CAs control who you trust. None of that is specified in any RFC. It's entirely something we humans made up after someone created an enabling technology.
As for problems with PSTN, there are similar technical solutions, but largely PSTN fraud and spam are a social problem and require social interventions. This is why we have the FCC in the US, for example, because when the scope of an intervention becomes large enough it has to be administered by someone. When you say PSTN doesn't work because of fraud and spam, in my mind what you're saying is that the FCC does not do enough to prevent fraud and spam.
This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-...
Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects.
EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written.
I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.
In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.
Or you could have thousands of medium-sized companies that each operate nodes that interoperate with each other even though none of them is the size of Google or Meta, and users could choose one based on whether they want to see ads or pay a few bucks a year, or run their own if they're into that sort of thing.
> It just so happens that you need a certain amount of infrastructure to implement it, which is true of everything, even email.
The infrastructure you need for email is any functioning general purpose computer, including ones you can find in the trash, and a domain name, which you can also get for free if you really want to and in practice costs around $15/year to do it properly. Anyone with the inclination can do this and many solitary individuals actually do.
The infrastructure you would need for this thing would be even less, because the premise is that you already have an email address/provider, so all you'd really need is the ability to map a port so you can make a direct connection to the other endpoint -- or IPv6.
Whereas the infrastructure you need to participate in the PSTN... I think you're required to be a CLEC to even have a block of numbers assigned. If all you had to do was install Asterisk on the trash PC it would be something else entirely, but the telcos do a lot of regulatory gatekeeping, which is another reason the legacy phone network should be decommissioned and replaced by a modern IETF protocol.
Currently the only similar thing I'm aware of is https://delta.chat/en/, though I believe it does all of its networking over email, rather than only using it as a fallback.
I wonder what the pitfalls of using email this way are; it seems like a great way to get a free backend and growth-hack a chat app, so there must be some reason it's not more common.
It's the sort of thing you get when somebody builds it as a hobby project, or a skunkworks project escapes from a large corporation and is already open source by the time the MBAs get their hands on it. Or, in the old days, DARPA funding.
Point me to the existing IETF RFC for e.g. mapping email addresses as identifiers for use in a standard communications protocol for voice and video calls.
Not any more, at least for any semi-popular chat. The throwaway and no-names? Yeah you can, well until IF they get big. And well, they won't.
This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
Where we're all captive subjects of some cloud asshole spoon-feeding us bits of infrastructure we used to be able to run ourselves
Only android people fuss with third party apps because their phones can’t reasonably send messages by default.
IOW, SMS is cross-platform. Whats the issue?
Unlike modern messaging platforms, SMS has no:
- guaranteed delivery
- read receipts
- proper support for group chats (MMS adds this, but the implementation is poor compared to modern platforms)
- support for multimedia (again, MMS added this, but support is poor)
- support for replies
- support for reactions
- support for any kind of encryption
- support for typing indicators
- ability to work independently of an active cellular connection
If SMS works for your needs, and you have no issues with it, that’s great. Ultimately, SMS does work, but many users rightfully expect more of a messaging platform at this point. There are real benefits to users from upgrading to a more modern system.
I am fine with using SMS, and it has always served me well.
But that didn't address GP's comment. Apple states that green bubbles are pariahs because messages can't be sent to androids so it breaks the system, or something like that [BS]
Iphone users think that green bubbles are pariahs because they aren't part of their exclusive group, and because green bubbles turn chat groups into rubbish, because yada yada not iphone. (spoiler alert, apple does it on purpose)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/android-users-stig...
For laughs: Tim Cook telling someone he has to buy her mom an iphone (1hr 0mins 17secs)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=3615&v=sdvzYtgmIjs&feature=you...
This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.
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.
MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used.
Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages".
At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that.
Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.
Thanks for teaching me a new thing about life outside of the US. Out here, cell data plans (which is the budget that sending/receiving MMS would eat into) were relatively affordable (even for my somewhat modest household) through the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s. And now it's basically assumed that most people have "unlimited" data. So I guess MMS was a regional phenomena based on prices.
You didn't miss out on much, not that you probably thought you may have. MMS was a useful tool for sharing pictures digitally, but it was somewhat poor user experience waiting for it to reach the other person. Sometimes waiting for a reaction for an hour because the person on the receiving end wasn't near enough to a cell tower owned by their provider. Less of an issue with all the cell towers around now, but there are better mediums than MMS now.
I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received < 20 MMS in my whole life.
Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.