The only "exception" being one carrier in the USA does not seem to work with ofono (the underlying framework) yet, but that issue was also with the previous UBports edition.
But I am admittedly more familiar with the Phosh stack versus the KDE stack. Are you then using ofono and that is providing a working MMS support for the Pinephone?
(Sorry I am not trying to be confrontational, it would be amazing if MMS works!)
So I cannot speak to ofono, but modemmanager largely does support MMS, with two exceptions:
- The APN for mobile broadband needs to be the same for MMS (modemmanager does not have support for multiple APNs yet), and
- "transfer-route MT messages" aren't implemented (which some carriers use for MMS, but it is not clear for me to how).
The larger issue is that there is no stack on phosh to support any of this. I proposed a couple of ideas of how such as stack would work on their git site, but I don't have the time to impliment it.
From what I saw with scapebar, it does not have native support to send picture messages (MMS), does not recieve picture messages, and did not have a way to send a group message (MMS). I am admittedly not familiar enough with ofono to know what works or how it functions in the stack. However, there is MMS support in the patched ofono stack below:
Biggest question: Can I send SMS, on this phone, from another computer?
The biggest reason I ditched my iPhone for Android was the excellent implementation of in-browser messaging, to and from my phone, on any computer with a web browser.
I don't need to be able to text from "any computer with a web browser", but if I could send SMS from Win / Mac / Linux machines that I owned, that would be a huge incentive for me to give this platform a shot.
There is KDE Connect. You can easily respond to texts from that.
Barring that, sending a text is a simple one-liner in the terminal. Worst case, you can just run the command via ssh or whatever other workflow you may want.
I hadn't heard about the new support for MMS, that's fantastic news! It's such an important part of group messaging in the U.S. that not having access to it was a huge blocker for me in terms progress towards daily driver status.
Calls are also working fine.
The only "exception" being one carrier in the USA does not seem to work with ofono (the underlying framework) yet, but that issue was also with the previous UBports edition.