Group Text come in as Media texts

[Reptar8X]

I have had some continuous issues with group texting. Group messaging is turned on in my phone, 8X on ATT. When someone replies to my group message any one of 4 scenarios occurs:

Scenario 1, A OK:
The message appears in the group thread. The message itself is the actual text. The banner notification displays the actual text in the message.

Scenario 2, Incorrect Message Preview: The message appears in the group thread. The message itself is the actual text. The banner notification displays "Media content in this message."

Scenario 3, Just Plain Messed Up:
The message from "John" does not appear in the group thread; it appears in John's individual thread. The message itself says "Media content in this message.". The banner notification says "Media content in the message." I can click on the message text (its underlined) and it says "Getting media content now..." The message disappears and now the message loads into the group thread correctly. With the banner notification previewing actual text. And the message itself now being the actual text. The original "Media content......" message in Johns individual thread disappeared and never comes back. The kicker to this scenario is when I click the message in Johns individual thread it often freezes on "Getting media content now...." and never loads. I must restart my phone and then it will load the content. Restarting is not always successful and I am sometimes stuck with an unreadable message.

Is anyone else experiencing issues like this? Is it hardware? Considering contacting HTC to swap my phone out. Extremely frustrating considering how much I used group messaging especially after this holiday season with lots of threads with different family members.

 

[monels11]

I'm in a similar boat with you, experiencing all three scenarios. I've found to just accept it, it usually ends up working properly.

 

[slick5150]

Scenario 1 is generally when you're doing this with with someone with either WP or an iPhone.
Scenario 2 is when you have someone responding from an Android phone that supports group MMS
Scenario 3 is a network issue. The message comes in as an SMS but the associated data part (the MMS) didn't come through. So you have to click to retry it basically, it then realizes it was a group message and correctly puts it back into the group conversation.

With #1 and #2 - The issue is there's no standard for "group texting." Generally speaking, the iPhone and WP implementation of it works well together. Android barely supports the feature at all for whatever reason. Some Android phones support the feature, others don't. That's why there's a 4th scenario where you send a group text out to a group of people, but someone responds and it comes directly to you instead of keeping the group conversation going because they're responding from a phone that doesn't support it at all so it just sends a bunch of separate SMS texts back out which breaks the "group" part of it.

 

[Reptar8X]

Thanks slick5150 for the help. Your explanation definitely makes sense for the behavior I am experiencing.
I knew Android wasn't all ironed out with Group messaging but most of my conversations are with all iPhone users so I wasn't sure what was the root. Also have a buddy with a 920 on the same network in town not experiencing any issues, so I had already reached out to HTC for support.
I'll definitely keep your reply in mind. Curious as to what HTC will tell me.

 

[whereishenow]

I just started experiencing the 2nd issue (multimedia message notification). I think this started about two weeks ago. Previous to about 2 weeks back my notification bar always displayed the message itself.

Has something that has changed to cause this? Is there any fix?

 

[Reptar8X]

I finally for a reply back from HTC after Slick5150 posted his response. HTC, to no surprise, confirmed what slick stated. Network issues with the text coming through properly and lack of a group messaging standard across platforms.