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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T07:26:17+00:00

I’ve got an app that lets users send sms messages. Works great when the

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I’ve got an app that lets users send sms messages. Works great when the message < 160 characters. After that, things work less-perfectly. Seems like there are a few options here:

  1. Manually break the message up into multiple SMSs, send each part as a separate SMS.
  2. Use the multi-part send SMS function (sendMultipartTextMessage()).
  3. Send the message as an MMS message (sendDataMessage()?).

Here’s my novice take on it:

1)
most well supported across carriers. Users may get mad that you just cost them N separate messages though, instead of converting to MMS or something.

2)
not sure if this is supported by different carriers, and read that once the message is greater than 3 * 160 chars in length, gets converted to MMS anyway by different SMS apps – maybe stay away from this altogether.

3)
not sure how to do this, and older phones might not support MMS. To send an MMS using the android SDK, do we just use the SmsManager.sendDataMessage() method?

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    seems to me that the first option is what most mobile phones do by default. sms messages by design can only send a certain amount of characters (160 probbaly), just inform the user that the message is too big and if he still wants to send it anyway (informing also how many sms would the total be).

    as for MMS and multipart as you said not every carrier supports it, so they dont seem to be the best option.

    EDIT: as for how does MMS work on android-sdk check this thread out: Android SDK MMS

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