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Fair warning for anyone considering the phone: it doesn't appear to support group messaging. If you live in Europe, you might not care. If you live in the US, t

Fair warning for anyone considering the phone: it doesn't appear to support group messaging. If you live in Europe, you might not care. If you live in the US, this is quite possibly a dealbreaker. https://forum.mudita.com/t/group-messaging/975 https://forum.mudita.com/t/group-messaging/975 Of course, now that it's open source someone could add it, but... too fundamental of a feature for me to start daily driving it in the first place.

pbronez 5y ago
Interesting. That's a restriction on Tesla's infotainment system as well. I wonder how the underlying standards differ. What makes group messaging so much harder to implement? I agree it's a pretty key feature. Of course, there are a lot of other problems with SMS. There's a reason other chat apps are so common, and a lot of it is key features like delivery confirmation and message length. Perhaps Mudita should offer a cloud service that bridges various chat apps to their phone. If they take a privacy-first approach, it could be a really nice service. Similarly, I would love to streaming music on this thing. Spotify runs on everything, so why not here? Maybe I don't totally agree with their product vision though. I like the idea of a slimmed down, privacy-respecting phone. I just don't want to give up ALL the benefits of a smart phone. I would welcome a unified chat interface and a simplified Spotify app. I would probably be willing to pay a subscription for secure backends to give me a streamlined, integrated experience.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  > What makes group messaging so much harder to implement? Group messaging requires MMS, so you don't get it for free by just implementing SMS. Most up-and-coming platforms seem to stop at SMS - which you do need for MMS as its control messages are sent via SMS, but it's not enough.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    MMS is overpriced in all European networks that I know of. This might be why it's not seeing much adoption.
hnlmorg 5y ago
That will be because SMS doesn't support group messages and MMS is a different protocol entirely (believe it or not MMS content exchange is done via HTTP, using SMS only for pushing control messages[1]). So unfortunately group messages are one of those occasions where superficially easy problem becomes a non-trivial feature to add. [1] > the content is extracted and sent to a temporary storage server with an HTTP front-end. An SMS "control message" containing the URL of the content is then sent to the recipient's handset to trigger the receiver's WAP browser to open and receive the content from the embedded URL. Several other messages are exchanged to indicate the status of the delivery attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#Technical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#T...
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  Right, I'm aware it uses MMS; my other comment mentions this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176484 Whether it's SMS or MMS on the backend doesn't matter to me as a user, it's still a fundamental enough feature of a mobile phone for me that I can't consider one without it.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    Sending SMS basically comes free with a mobile plan in my country. MMS messages still cost just as much as 20 years ago (which is to say, they are priced unrealistically).
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      It's reversed in the US; MMS is typically free on even the cheapest plans here, data is metered.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Except the little detail that MMS pays per amount of recipients.
    - 5y ago

pbronez 5y ago

Interesting. That's a restriction on Tesla's infotainment system as well. I wonder how the underlying standards differ. What makes group messaging so much harder to implement? I agree it's a pretty key feature. Of course, there are a lot of other problems with SMS. There's a reason other chat apps are so common, and a lot of it is key features like delivery confirmation and message length. Perhaps Mudita should offer a cloud service that bridges various chat apps to their phone. If they take a privacy-first approach, it could be a really nice service. Similarly, I would love to streaming music on this thing. Spotify runs on everything, so why not here? Maybe I don't totally agree with their product vision though. I like the idea of a slimmed down, privacy-respecting phone. I just don't want to give up ALL the benefits of a smart phone. I would welcome a unified chat interface and a simplified Spotify app. I would probably be willing to pay a subscription for secure backends to give me a streamlined, integrated experience.

ryukafalz 5y ago
> What makes group messaging so much harder to implement? Group messaging requires MMS, so you don't get it for free by just implementing SMS. Most up-and-coming platforms seem to stop at SMS - which you do need for MMS as its control messages are sent via SMS, but it's not enough.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  MMS is overpriced in all European networks that I know of. This might be why it's not seeing much adoption.

hnlmorg 5y ago

That will be because SMS doesn't support group messages and MMS is a different protocol entirely (believe it or not MMS content exchange is done via HTTP, using SMS only for pushing control messages[1]). So unfortunately group messages are one of those occasions where superficially easy problem becomes a non-trivial feature to add. [1] > the content is extracted and sent to a temporary storage server with an HTTP front-end. An SMS "control message" containing the URL of the content is then sent to the recipient's handset to trigger the receiver's WAP browser to open and receive the content from the embedded URL. Several other messages are exchanged to indicate the status of the delivery attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#Technical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service#T...

ryukafalz 5y ago
Right, I'm aware it uses MMS; my other comment mentions this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176484 Whether it's SMS or MMS on the backend doesn't matter to me as a user, it's still a fundamental enough feature of a mobile phone for me that I can't consider one without it.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Sending SMS basically comes free with a mobile plan in my country. MMS messages still cost just as much as 20 years ago (which is to say, they are priced unrealistically).
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    It's reversed in the US; MMS is typically free on even the cheapest plans here, data is metered.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Except the little detail that MMS pays per amount of recipients.
  - 5y ago