https://forum.mudita.com/t/group-messaging/975
Of course, now that it's open source someone could add it, but... too fundamental of a feature for me to start daily driving it in the first place.
So unfortunately group messages are one of those occasions where superficially easy problem becomes a non-trivial feature to add.
[1] > the content is extracted and sent to a temporary storage server with an HTTP front-end. An SMS "control message" containing the URL of the content is then sent to the recipient's handset to trigger the receiver's WAP browser to open and receive the content from the embedded URL. Several other messages are exchanged to indicate the status of the delivery attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#T...
Whether it's SMS or MMS on the backend doesn't matter to me as a user, it's still a fundamental enough feature of a mobile phone for me that I can't consider one without it.
If a European company wants to put a lower priority on implementing MMS knowing that it's both non-trivial and non-free in most of the world -- not least of all their own country -- then I that's a perfectly reasonably thing for them to do.
I agree it's a pretty key feature.
Of course, there are a lot of other problems with SMS. There's a reason other chat apps are so common, and a lot of it is key features like delivery confirmation and message length.
Perhaps Mudita should offer a cloud service that bridges various chat apps to their phone. If they take a privacy-first approach, it could be a really nice service.
Similarly, I would love to streaming music on this thing. Spotify runs on everything, so why not here?
Maybe I don't totally agree with their product vision though. I like the idea of a slimmed down, privacy-respecting phone. I just don't want to give up ALL the benefits of a smart phone. I would welcome a unified chat interface and a simplified Spotify app.
I would probably be willing to pay a subscription for secure backends to give me a streamlined, integrated experience.
Group messaging requires MMS, so you don't get it for free by just implementing SMS. Most up-and-coming platforms seem to stop at SMS - which you do need for MMS as its control messages are sent via SMS, but it's not enough.