Lack of MMS is a shortcoming that really affects only North America. MMS is not widely used elsewhere. Really, getting Whatsapp to work through an Android emulation layer like Anbox is the higher priority for much of the world now.
I think Anbox is a mistake for the Librem. If you want android apps just run android. All this effort to have a totally independent OS, but really just run android apps on it.
But MMS works with anybody with a phone, and you don't even need a good internet connection.
For a quick picture, a contact card or a small voice message, it's great.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/7RQwoJ8z83Zi65NDMvmHKVU0Wx...
same here in germany. nobody ever uses it
But we all have mums (or other people not using a chat app), and a lot of us write text messages to them. If the text message is more than 3 sms, congrats, you use mms. If you use the feature "send contact" or make any attachment to your text message, you use mms. If you send an emoji in you text message, you may also use mms.
You don't have to be aware that you are sending an mms to send one. Most sms apps do it transparently.
The biggest sender of mms is probably iMessage from iOS, because it makes let tech saavy users ignore the difference between chat and sms (the infamous green bubbles). So users just send stuff, and sometimes, they do so using mms.
The less technical the user, the more likely they are to send mms without knowing they are.
it would be interesting to map MMS usage worldwide, maybe it's a more important feature than I thought
EDIT: correction, I actually tried MMS once or twice with a phone circa 2007-2008, just checked (so not quite 20 years)
So if you take a smartphone photo, and send it to a phone number contact in a message, boom, you just sent an MMS.
A majority of random american public wouldn't recognize the MMS acronym, despite likely using it regularly.
visiting the US back in the day I realised just how different the "phone culture" was, for instance there was such a thing like being charged for receiving calls (in ~2008) and drastically different coverage maps, etc - I have no idea how things are now over there
Coverage is still an issue.
one of the reasons why I suspect MMS went completely unnoticed here in the UK is that Blackberry was extremely popular rather early, and then Android ate it
I don't think I've ever sent a single group message over MMS
> I haven't seen or used an MMS for maybe 20+
That's a bit of an exaggeration:
> The first MMS-capable phones were introduced around 2002 in conjunction with the first GSM network.
I remember the model of the phone I used MMS last, but couldn't remember the exact year. Just looked the model up and I see it's not as old as I thought. It was about 12-13 years ago actually around 2007~2008.
I'm pretty certain I haven't even tried MMS in any other phone since. With blackberries I used their messenger, with Android I used various apps, never MMS. I still use plain SMS occasionally.
I used to work in a mobile operator (not Sweden) and MMS didn't have any usage worth talking about.
> MMS is the safe fall-back when unsure or if it fails.
Except when it isn't.
The mechanic who services my cars is the only person I know (since at least 15 yrs) who has this strange thing for MMS. He always tries to first contact me with MMS before calling me, and I've never received any of those, not even once.
I never really bothered, but the last time I checked (15 yrs ago), MMS required some additional setup.
So "MMS works for everyone" isn't really a thing
I'm kind of surprised it isn't still a thing in Europe. Did cell phones just not take off until the mid 2000s when there were other options available.. so MMS didn't have the inertia it has in the US? It is pretty ingrained here, for example all take out services use MMS to give you order status and, AFAIK, they don't support other messaging systems.
e.g. Mexico had cellphone penetration so low until recently that it got to skip the SMS/MMS era entirely.
You would have needed a certain critical cultural mass using MMS to still be using it in 2020.
Everyone on almost every phone has MMS, no matter what else they might have. It's the common language.