Since the iPhone hit the scene my wife made a point to say how appauled and disappointed she was that it does not support MMS and that she will not get one until it does. For her this was the breaking point that no amount of advertising or hype could change. And for many people I’m sure this remains true. I can’t say that not being able send or receive MMS hasn’t been a litttle annoying for me but I do understand why it was left out.
The under lying issue is that MMS is not 100% interoperable between cellular carriers. I experienced this first hand when I started using it on a T-Mobile Dash just 3 years ago. I would receive an MMS and the audio would not play or the text that came with it would not show. The other cravat was that it would simply not send the message in the first place of I would get a blank message altogether.
Unfortunately, unlike email, MMS does not have a standard set of protocals from which to operate. This causes all types of issues between carriers and the phones themselves.
The other issue is that not every phone supports MMS in the first place. Contrary to popular belief there are still lots of people who have phones that only make calls and nothing else. Only good feature phones and most smartphones support MMS.
Apple likes their users to have a good and relatively trouble free experience as much as possible. So for them to not include MMS was purely a logical choice since any issues that may arise would be completely out of their control or even AT&T’s for that matter.
MMS should be a flawless inoperable function like email; that the user does not have to think about. But right now even though it is used by many it’s still not. Hopefully, carriers will solve this issue since it’s a very useful feature or replace it with something better.
Wyatt's Tech Corner 