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by crottypeter 1059 days ago
Group messages.

If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group and receive replies to the whole group.

(P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited exposure to iMessage's feature-set).
3 comments
vel0city 1059 days ago
I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.
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crottypeter 1058 days ago
Just checked my provider's pricing ( in the UK) MMS are capped at 300kB and cost 30p (0.39 USD) per message.

That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative.

Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic.

Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.

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vel0city 1058 days ago
Dang, that's some highway robbery pricing right there.

Here in the US its common to have at least 1MB MMS max size. Back in the day 300-600KB was often the max size, but that's definitely changed over the years. Maybe its just splitting it up and re-assembling it behind the scenes, I'm not sure.

I can't speak for all history, but from about 2004 or so in the US MMS and SMS were often bundled and billed the same, especially for networks which had rolled out 3G/EV-DO. Having a plan with 500 messages usually meant 500 combined SMS and MMS message.

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wtallis 1059 days ago
> If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different?

Does MMS not exist in your country?

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crottypeter 1058 days ago
It does, but is priced uncompetitively compared to mobile data.
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wtallis 1058 days ago
Interesting. Here in the US, plans that don't include unlimited talk+text are hard to find, even among the budget MVNOs, and that's been the case for at least a decade.
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kingrazor 1059 days ago
That used to be my experience years ago, but now whether I use android or iphone, I see the whole group.
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