This. So much this.

I'm particularly old school in a lot of things, but I actually use my phone to call people. Whenever it can do everything BUT that one function, I start to question it. Too many people are too concentrated on auxiliary functions that tend to be nowhere near communication on these phones/devices, but more like they're replacing a computer.

I found it appropriate that the N900 was considered a "pocket pc". Much like I was fond of the separation of the "internet tablets" that the 770 through N810 represented. It wasn't a phone, those labels managed expectations and I had no misconception of what I owned.

Now? If it can send an emoji or connect to some social media, folks call it a phone if it fits into your pocket. Whether or not it can actually do "phone things" is often a secondary thought.

Back to topic though... I feel as if this feature was overlooked because it seems to be a rather North American thing. It's not unique, but it seems to be something that works well here. But then again, the original release of the N900 saw that it had no MMS capabilities. Go figure.

It makes sense for a company that has yet to enter North America not to waste resources on a feature that only benefits those in North America. I was just hoping that with Sailfish X official making it's way to our shores, either Jolla or a skilled developer might take a look into this.

I guess I won't hold my breath!

In case anyone from Jolla checks this, yes, this would be an appreciated feature to have on Sailfish.

For those who haven't used this, I shall give you a use case:

Working with a group of 10-12 people distributed in a convention center who are technicians monitoring the distribution of live video content for attendees. I'll be in the broadcast studio with phone on silent. Each person has their own phones, which these days has been narrowed down to iPhones, Android-based phones, and me, which up until this weekend has been an N9. A group MMS is set up and everyone just replies to that.

I'll send out an instruction and everyone needs to see that. But if one person observes an anomaly in the broadcast where they are located, they immediately report it. Everyone gets the message and they can start chiming in with their observations. We quickly determine whether this is an isolated glitch, or a system-wide problem.

The people only work with each other for the duration of the broadcast and we may not see each other again. So trying to get people to install an app, set up an account just to work a few days is problematic. It's just easier to get everyone's phone number and do the group MMS. Anymore, I may not even program them in as a contact and just have the phone numbers show up in the chat.

Doing this with the N9 was torturous. All the messages come as separate threads based on the person sending it. If there was a conversation taking place, I could click on person A, read ten messages from them but not understand context because I had to click on person B to see their messages, and so on. It definitely has not been as efficient as it is for everyone else on the team.

What I did not know until reading this thread is that this is a pretty much U.S.-only thing. Then again, as someone pointed out, when you pay by message, that would be crazy expensive really quickly. It is only a thing in the U.S. because of the unlimited messages plans I guess.

Oh well. I'll add my vote to a request to see this implemented in the future, but I get the business decision to not allocate resources toward this if it's just the U.S. market that uses it.

It is a huge mistake to underestimate the importance of this feature to those who use it. I have been trying to adapt to the limitations of Sailfish, and this missing feature has been tough. But may have just hit a real roadblock due to this. One of my parents just became very ill. My siblings and I are about to have many group text messages to keep informed and coordinate needs. I have to be a part of that. And this feature--which must be trivial to implement---my be the straw that broke the camel's back. I truly can't imagine how others don't want this simple feature.

Agree. I wish they will fix it. This is the primary reason, I cannot use Sailfish OS as my daily driver. I am a big fan of Sailfish and used it for few years, suffering through this shameful limitation. Now more people are using group text/mms and it has become a necessary feature and I have started using Android

Oh, I am sorry for the family situation. That really is difficult. Most of the time, my phone has been a fun project for me. Yes, I use it for daily life and it's both a blessing and curse to have these things, in my opinion. Overall, it's a project of interest for me. You guys, the community, the hard-working people at Jolla, even Sony allocating resources to help with Jolla - it's all fun for me to watch and even be on the outer periphery of the experience.

However, there are times when "ain't nobody got time for that" and one really needs the tech to work "for real". Lancewex, you are in one of those times. If I could just spend a few hundred bucks to make group MMS "just work" on Sailfish for all of us, but especially you right now, I would.

So, I've been a long-time user of Maemo/MeeGo, but I stopped for a while after Nokia scrapped it. This is the first post I've made after lurking these forums for nearly a decade, but it won't be a happy post unfortunately.

I finally got a phone with a decent Sailfish port the other day, and right after I install Sailfish, suddenly someone I know has fallen ill and there's a ton of group texting going on. I honestly hate Android, and I was using the woefully outdated Firefox OS until I got the chance to jump back to a real Linux OS. The fact that I may have to swap my SIM card to another phone or flash Android just to 'solve' this issue is frustrating to say the least.

What makes this especially annoying is that Sailfish is better than I had expected in every other area I care about. It's essentially the perfect user experience for me with the exception of this one critical flaw. I don't get into group texts on a weekly basis or anything, but when they do come it's usually fairly important.

Is there really no workaround for this? I can't find any patches in Warehouse on a cursory look, but I wouldn't imagine this to be overly difficult to implement. If Sailfish X officially supported North America, I expect this would already be a major issue. In any case, I would personally be willing to pay to get this feature implemented.

Creating a group MMS application probably would not be a big deal, it's practically just the way messages are indexed together when shown in the UI and creating a list of messages-to-be-sent automatically when replying to the group.

Possibly something anybody interested could whip up in a few hours and polish up to publishable form in days.

It's just matter of nobody taking interest in it, maybe there really are no active SFOS developers in NA? As you know, people tend to make applications that they themselves need and as I previously stated I had not even heard of such a thing before reading this thread, GroupMMS is just not used in Europe...

I'm reading this as another European and I'm wondering why you are using MMS to have what appears to be a pure text conversation when SMS is cheaper. Is the difference between the two recognised in America or is this another pants/trousers situation?

Thinking on implementation if these are temporary groups all it would need is to clone the messaging app and a add a list of numbers and a start and end date/time and filter the standard message database to show anything that matches. This would mean any non-group messages from someone in the group would appear randomly in the middle of the conversation but that's liveable.

Now, is the messaging app open source...

I think it's because MMS has this group thingy. (which we don't use really in europe, at least I don't even as I use MMSn heavily)
It's probably a header extension in the message that defines it is a part of group or something...

Besides whether MMS is cheap or expensive depends really on the operator contract; maybe they have a set amount of free MMS'es per month or something.


Yes, I thought of the same but have not really even checked if it is open. And even if it is not, it would probably be not that difficult thing to make from scratch.