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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app

(Almost) nobody here is challenging that it is, under the condition that you communicate exclusively with iPhone users.

MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

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Wait, there are still places that charge per MMS?

Some countries/providers just never stopped, especially those where MMS never really became popular and was quickly replaced by WhatsApp.

Some carriers/plans don’t even offer it.

30p per MMS - everybody uses WhatsApp, the only time I use iMessage/SMS is for receiving OTP codes.

No, I mean as an sms app. It’s fine for that. Group sms can get kinda rough but I’ve also never had a phone that did it better, including pre-iPhone phones, and a few Android phones. Of course it’s better if you can stay in iMessage, to avoid SMS, same as switching over to WhatsApp or whatever is way better.

> MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

Yes, agreed, I’ve never seen it not be awful.

iOS Messages is a terrible SMS app!

It doesn’t support delivery receipts (my old Nokia could do that in 2003!), doesn’t let me send texts to a specific number of a given contact, doesn’t let me pick what number I want to send texts from (for dual SIM), and most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage.

I can choose what number I want to send from when using two SIMs. It's shown as "From" below the "To" when you write a new SMS using the new message button. In an existing conversation you need to tap on the contact icon and change the "conversation line" there.

> most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage

You can long press on a sent iMessage blue bubble to reveal a 'Send as Text Message' menu item. It's quite hidden but it's there.

Only if the message didn’t go out to Apple’s servers. That doesn’t help me when I know the recipient won’t be able to receive it (e.g. because they are on roaming or out of mobile data).

If you know you want to send an SMS you can tap it right after you press send, there’s a small grace period. I just did it.

To send to a contact's specific #, there should be a disclosure arrow to the right of their name (as you're entering it) you can tap and then pick which # you want. You can also double-tap a name in the To field.

There’s no visual indication of which number messages are going to and arriving from for an existing conversation, though. Messages to and from all numbers are just collapsed into one thread.

It gets even worse when iMessage and multiple devices come into the mix. It all kind of works for 95% of people I’m sure, but it completely falls apart in some cases with absolutely no way to be more explicit.

Totally agree. I was on Google Voice till earlier this year and that was its own kind of awful. After more than a decade on GV, I ported my number back to my carrier. I keep WhatsApp on my phone to use with a single family member on an Android phone. Another member with an Android phone uses whatever the built-in messages app is. Everyone else is on an iPhone. It's a mess.

The annoying part is, that this ends up going back to the lowest common denominator. Where users that wont install another program end up being the boat anchor dragging everyone else to the bottom.

You can long press on the message bubble after hitting the send button in Messages to switch between sending as iMessage or SMS. Discoverability of UI/UX features on both iOS and Android is inscrutably horrible.

That button only appears when I don’t have a data connection.

Potential workflow, not that I consider this “sane” but rather a workaround:

Swipe up from bottom screen edge to open Control Center, toggle Cellular Data off, send as SMS, then toggle Cellular Data back on?

The ol' three-swipe-salute as it's known in some parts.

Maybe asking siri for help on this is the apple way.

What happens if you specifically ask Siri to send as text message and NOT iMessage?

delivery receipts = read receipts? They are a setting.

Tap on their name to change the "to" address; here it gives me a list of their Apple ID email and phone number to pick from.

You can enable fall-back for contacts which fail to send via iMessage to instead send via SMS, but I don't think you can send SMS to a phone number registered with iMessage by default without disabling iMessage globally.

Have you tried sending a picture via iMessage MMS? My wife's iPhone compresses every single picture she sends down to like 32kb and converts it to a JPEG. That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off (I'd hate to see what it sends when its turned on). The pictures I send her arrive only compressed down to 700k-1.1mb and retain formatting and even transparency (our carrier limits MMS messages to 1.2mb).

Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.

The compression level of MMS is set by the carrier, and cannot be changed or even queried.

Yes I'm well aware. What I'm talking about is iMessage doing it's own compression, which is more than what the carrier limit requires, as well as stripping file formatting from images and making them all JPEG. Me and my wife are on the same family plan so we have the same carrier. If the 32kb was a carrier limit, then the pictures I send my wife would be 32kb and just as blurry as the ones she sends me. They aren't, however. They're only compressed enough to where the fit the MMS size limit for the carrier

> That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off

I think that setting doesn’t even do anything for MMS.

SMS is too underpowered in 2023

SMS works quite well for what it was originally designed: Short, text-only messages to a specific mobile phone number. Using it for instant messaging has always seemed like a very weird usage of the protocol to me.

The two just have very different semantics, just like how it's generally accepted that email is not a great medium for group chat either.

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