[crottypeter]

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).

[vel0city]

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.

[crottypeter]

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.

[wtallis]

> 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?

[crottypeter]

It does, but is priced uncompetitively compared to mobile data.

[kingrazor]

That used to be my experience years ago, but now whether I use android or iphone, I see the whole group.