For one-to-one messages, SMS is mostly OK. Group chat via MMS is a bad experience. Group chat via internet-based chat like iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram,

For one-to-one messages, SMS is mostly OK. Group chat via MMS is a bad experience. Group chat via internet-based chat like iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc... is a good experience. Now the obvious solution is for the group to pick a cross-platform chat app and use that, but it's weirdly difficult to get a group of people to do that. Sometimes they would rather exclude someone from the group than switch apps, which might suggest that the excluded person needs better friends.