by Charles Miller

An app that is found on every smart phone, including many inexpensive not-so-smart phones, is the "Messages" app. As its name implies, this app is used for sending simple messages, however; as 21st century technology dictates: things that should be simple are never really as simple as they ought to be. Such is the case with the ubiquitous Messages app.

While there is one "Messages" app, that app is compatible with three distinctly different messaging systems known as SMS, RCS, and MMS and all the rules change depending on which of the systems you use. The messaging system your cell phone uses can sometimes change as you move from place to place and the phone connects to different cell towers. On top of this confusing situation is the fact that you often will not know what kind of system it is to which you are connected, and you almost never have any control over which system to use.

First I should try to clarify the differences between the systems. Historically there are some good reasons the different systems exist, but in the interest of brevity I am not going to address that today:

SMS (Short Message Service) as its name implies is for short messages. The strict limit is 160 characters per message with no support for colors, fonts, graphics or anything fancy.

RCS (Rich Communication Services) on the other hand has no set limit to the number of characters that can be sent in one message, and supports graphics, videos, audio messages, and interactive elements.

MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is a messaging technology that extends SMS by allowing users to include multimedia content such as images, videos, audio files, and longer text messages.

In most cases when you tap on the Messages app on your phone, what you will get is the SMS protocol. Depending on your cell phone provider, you could instead be using RCS or MMS. There is one thing all have in common:

To varying degrees, all of these text messaging systems should be considered less than reliable because of several technical and operational factors, including phone status, carrier filtering, and limitations of the basic SMS system that RCS and MMS are unable to overcome, and other potential points of failure. The result is that text messages can fail to be delivered because the recipient’s phone is turned off, messages deleted after mistakenly being identified as spam, or full inboxes. Then there is the fact there is no reliable way to know if a text message failed or was successfully delivered. The biggest issue though seems to be that many cell phone companies look at text in their messaging infrastructure as a low-priority item, preferring to put their efforts into providing better voice calls and more reliable internet connectivity. And before complaining about the service, remember cell phone providers are delivering communications for a much lower price today than what they charged twenty years ago.

Because sending text messages is such a hit-or-miss proposition I cannot recommend using texts for vitally-important communications. What I can and do recommend is if you use text messages you should have an agreed-upon protocol between the sender and recipient to verify your messages are received. This can be as simple as both agreeing to "Text me back to let me know you received, please." That is really the only practical way to verify that a text message you sent was actually delivered successfully to the recipient.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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