We'll see if it fixes the big issue I'm having - a friend who ditched his iPhone can exchange SMS messages with me and others individually, but he can't participate in group threads anymore. No error, he just never receives the messages.
Seconded. I still have the old iPhone. I wonder if reregistering and deregistering with the new tool will help or just make things worse.
This is only an issue for me because Apple made the arbitrary decision to make your iPhone functionally useless after a restore unless you insert a SIM. I still use my iPhone for dev. Guess what happened after a restore once I inserted my SIM? My iPhone automatically enrolled my phone number in iMessages. I spent months getting SMS working after switching to Android and I'm back at square one. This is antitrust level BS.
Likewise here - switched from iPhone (on Verizon) to Android (on T-Mobile), and in several group threads I no longer see the replies of some of the participants. Truly frustrating, and makes you feel marginalized from the conversation.
What Android SMS app does he use? Tell him to try another. Group texts over MMS appears to be somewhat of a kludge, and different text apps support or do not support it to differing degrees. For some of the ones that do, 80% of their changelogs appear to be "Improved support for group texts / MMS bug fixes".
I've found that the best way to fix this is to get everyone who participates in the group conversation to delete the conversation from their phones. Then once everyone's done that, one person can send a message to everyone else and it should use SMS.
In my experience, it looks like iMessage stores metadata about the chat medium for a given conversation, and that's determined upon creating the conversation.
When sending individual messages, iMessage doesn't seem to attempt to determine whether conversation partner has gone dark from iMessage and fall back to MMS going forward. So everyone else gets the message, but not the person without an iPhone.
Group threads have been implemented as MMS on all major smartphone operating systems. Unfortunately, Android didn't get it until Android 4.2 or something.
The key is that the recipient list is sent with the message, so the other clients know who else is participating in the group, and can also thread and send outgoing messages accordingly.
