MMS group chats on Kompakt

Mudita Products
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Figured something out that I hope others may find useful. I’m sure others have figured this out too, but I haven’t found a record of it so I’ll make one.

My context: my family are all iPhone users, and switching all the group chats from iMessage to MMS has been a challenge because iPhone now defaults to RCS when iMessage is unavailable, which is a problem because Kompakt can’t receive RCS. Here’s what we found to make it work:

  1. On Kompakt, in SMS app, under Settings, select your SIM card and under Group Messaging make sure “Single MMS Group Chat” and “Download MMS content” is enabled.
  2. On iPhone, under Settings → Apps → Messages, Disable RCS temporarily.
  3. Kompakt: Start the group chat. iPhone users will receive MMS group chat.
  4. iPhone: Send a message in the group chat. It will now be MMS because RCS is disabled and iMessage is unavailable.
  5. iPhone: reenable RCS. They will continue to send MMS in this group chat, but have RCS available for texting anybody else.

I haven’t figured out yet if iPhone will notice when a new group chat has my Kompakt phone number in it and automatically shift into MMS. Will update here when I know.

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Unable to send group MMS
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Thanks! What do you mean by “Start” when you write, “Kompakt: Start the group chat.”?

  1. Use the Kompakt to open an existing group chat and start chatting again within it?
  2. Have everyone who was a participant in an existing group chat delete that chat from each of their cellphones and then use the Kompakt to begin/initiate/construct a new group chat with those same participants?
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I created a whole new group chat. Other people didn’t have to delete the old chat, but it is a whole new chat. So, closer to option 2 than 1.
I couldn’t see any already existing chats because they were all in RCS or iMessage, and of course I wasn’t getting any messages sent through those protocols, so I had to recreate the chats from scratch. I don’t know if having one member of the group chat refuse to follow these steps would nullify the efforts of the others, and I don’t know how to get iPhones to recognize that they’re trying to send RCS to a phone that isn’t compatible with it. Might be worth a call to Apple tech support down the line.

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