Question

Failure to send/receive MMS on Android phones

  • 26 February 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 459 views
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From time to time, I'm unable to send or recieve MMS messages on my Android phone.  I've documented some of my experiences here, but I thought I'd raise the issue under a different heading in hopes that someone, perhaps from T-Mobile, could offer a solution or at least a cause for this problem.  None of the suggestions in the aforementioned link help me.

I use the stock Android text messaging app because I like its integration with the "Messages for web" capability.  At one point, though, I switched over to Textra and got an error message noting that there were "no MMS connections available" when the send/receive MMS problem occurred.  

When this problem happens to me, I have to reboot my phone to restore MMS functionality.  It then works for a limited time before it comes back again.  I'll go through several rounds of this over a period of 2-3 days, then all will be well for weeks.  But the problem keeps coming back.

I should note that, when I'm experiencing this problem, it affects only MMS messages.  I can happily send and receive SMS messages while I'm experiencing the MMS problem.  Also, my wife has an iPhone, and she never has this problem.

I'm not expert, but it seems to me that this problem is being caused by a lack of capacity somewhere in the T-Mobile environment coupled with the standard way Android processes MMS messages.

Can someone help me understand what is causing this problem and how I might overcome it?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

5 replies

syaoran
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Do you have chat features enabled?  are you trying to send things to large to be sent over MMS?

Syaoran - I am not a T-Mobile Employee but I could use a new job!
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Do you have chat features enabled?  are you trying to send things to large to be sent over MMS?

Thanks for the quick response.

Yes, I have chat features enabled, and I’ve had them enabled for a long time.  No, I’m not trying to send any large files over MMS.  The problem occurs even when I send a simple message to a group of two or three people consisting only of text.

syaoran
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Userlevel 7
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Disable the chat features and see if the issue persists.  With Google making changes to RCS, I would personally leave the chat features off until they finish their changes and release a newer version of the app.

Syaoran - I am not a T-Mobile Employee but I could use a new job!
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Disable the chat features and see if the issue persists.  With Google making changes to RCS, I would personally leave the chat features off until they finish their changes and release a newer version of the app.

I will do that and report back what happens.  Thank you for the suggestion!

Edited to add:  I will note though, that I’ve used T-Mobile’s bundled app and the Textra app and have experienced the problem with them, too.  Textra does not have chat features.  I’m not sure about T-Mobile’s.

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Update:  I disabled chat features on the Android app.  All was well for about an hour and the problem just recurred, so disabling chat on Android did not solve the problem.

For grins, I just started using the app that comes with T-Mobile.  I’ll report back on how that works.

Meanwhile, any other suggestions would be most helpful.

Thanks.

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