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Initial support for MMS messages in Google Voice arrived in 2014, but only for photos — video and audio attachments still eluded Voice users. Thankfully, this is finally being addressed. The changelog for version 2018.43 of Voice includes "playback support for audio and video MMS attachments."
Google Voice was once thought to be abandoned, but these days we're seeing regular updates and improvements. The latest version bump hit yesterday with small fixes and tweaks to the UI, plus preparations for some future enhancements.
Earlier today, subscribers to Google's Project Fi may have run into a problem sending or receiving SMS or MMS messages. The brief outage appears to have started this morning, with reports of resolution emerging around 3:50 PM Eastern Time (12:50 PM Pacific). SMS and MMS are now reported as working by many, though it may not be resolved for all subscribers and you may run into additional delays as a result of a backlog of messages waiting to hit your phone.
According to a statement made by a Google employee on the Pixel product forums, a somewhat widespread problem with receiving MMS messages on the Pixel 2 XL has been resolved. But if you ask the people that claimed to be affected, you'll get a very different answer.
There's a new version of Android Messages rolling out to our phones. So far, we haven't seen any significant changes to the UI, but huge things are happening under the surface. A teardown reveals Google is getting ready to launch a web interface that would allow users to pair their phones with a computer for all of their texting needs. Google may also be planning to offer its own enhanced chat features to work with RCS messaging. And finally, it looks like we'll be able to buy things from companies right from within Android Messages. Grab the APK at the bottom of the post if you'd like to get your hands on it before everybody else.
SMS Backup & Restore is a well-known app in these parts, especially among those of us that have to (or choose to) swap devices frequently. Just last year, the app was picked up by Carbonite, and with the purchase came a nice visual overhaul. But now it appears that Carbonite had decided to hand the app off of SyncTech, an Australian company.
No Android phone is without issues, and the Google Pixel is certainly no exception. One of the problems reported was a strange bug related to sending screenshots over MMS. If someone sent a screenshot from an iPhone 7 Plus to a Pixel in a text, regardless of the SMS app being used on the Pixel, the screenshot would be displayed as a garbled mess (seen above).
The mobile market is mature enough that there aren't too many issues left when it comes to cross-compatibility between Android and iOS, at least for relatively simple matters like mobile web surfing or SMS. But the latest flagship phones on both sides of the aisle seem to have a bit of digital beef, at least according to a few Pixel owners. This discussion on the Google's product forum details a bizarre bug distorting screenshots sent from the iPhone 7 Plus (the latest and most expensive iPhone) to the Pixel.
Pushbullet began as a quick way to send files, links, and other data from one device to another. Along the way, the team took the infrastructure it had in place and introduced instant messaging (through a phone using SMS). Last month the feature grew to include group conversations. Today, the service has evolved to support sending picture messages.
I won't beat around the bush: there's a rumor Google Hangouts may lose its originally much-demanded SMS and MMS capabilities. Google's potential reasoning aside, this is very obviously a user experience concern for everyone who makes use of Hangouts on a daily basis. Even if you don't use Hangouts for SMS or MMS regularly (or ever), the fact that it can do these things may well be a reason to stick with the service in favor of other, competing messaging platforms.
The relationship between Hangouts and SMS/MMS messaging has been a long, gut-wrenching story full of danger at every turn. Although Hangouts 4.0 was a massive improvement over every previous version, it would appear that all is still not well on the MMS side of things.
At long last, Google Voice MMS works on all major North American carriers. Verizon was the last of the big boys to hold things up, but that changes today. You can now send pictures in a Google Voice MMS to your friends on Big Red and they will actually see them.
Ever since we first took a look at Motorola's Nexus 6 (and subsequently saw it leaked and finally announced) there's been a question about that blue and white icon in the dock. We learned directly from Google that it would be a new app called Messenger, that sounds like it will - for all intents and purposes - replace the AOSP messaging app that used to appear on stock devices. But Google didn't give up many details about the app, outside the fact that it would be "specially designed to be a quick and easy way to send and receive SMS and MMS messages on Android," with more information forthcoming.
As cool as Google Voice's free text message service is, it has always been a bit barebones. Big features like MMS have been missing for a lot of users, with some notable exceptions. Multimedia Message Service, usually used to simply attach a photo to a text message, is handled by completely different servers at most carriers, causing some problems with Google's forwarding system. It looks like Google has addressed these issues, at least for most people in the US and Canada, finally enabling the sending and receiving of MMS via Google Voice.
It's been over two months since Google gave Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 owners a chance to tinker with the upcoming L release of Android, in what has been the biggest beta test in Android's short history. With all of us waiting on a release sometime in the fourth quarter of 2014, it's gratifying to know that the powers that be are hard at work getting Android L ready for primetime. If the latest updates to the public issue tracker are accurate, some of the biggest and most critical bugs in Android L have been patched.
Google is rolling out an updated version of Hangouts, and while version 2.0.2 doesn't introduce much in the way of exciting new features, it squashes a handful of annoying bugs introduced when the app took on the ability to handle SMS and MMS messages.
First, we heard that KitKat would bring some changes to the API, breaking many of the SMS apps we've come to rely on. On the day KitKat was released, we were given a more full explanation, shining some light on the technical details and exactly what types of apps would be affected. But did anybody really think this was the end of the story? It turns out that a hidden permission exists which can still grant non-default apps the right to modify the SMS database just like they used to - no rooting required.