> In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm not sure how else it would even work?
I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.
But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.
It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".
I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the messages belong to the correct group.
But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to" header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the "to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.
It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out "reply-to".