Sending long sms messages

Question

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 opti

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

This is quite an old post but it's high up on Google when searching for Android multipart sms, so maybe it helps someone.

Regarding part 1 and 2, it's pretty much the same thing. To use sendMultipartTextMessage, you need to break up the long message into an ArrayList of Strings. It then sends as many SMS as needed. In short:

SmsManager sms = SmsManager.getDefault();
ArrayList<String> parts = sms.divideMessage(longMessage);
sms.sendMultipartTextMessage(phoneNumber, null, parts, null, null);

Part 3: MMS is not an option, as it has been pointed out. The charges and all.

Answer 3

I would suggest the usage of option 2 when you are working on Androids GSM based handsets.

GSM based Mobile device takes care of segmentation in which breaking the messages to multiparts for sending in performed and also assembling of the multipart messages in to one message on receipt.

If you have a method which takes care of sending text messages, than by default use the options of manager.divideMessage as it will work even if the message segments required are only 1 in number.

I dont think you should have any problem sending messages using option 2 and it will also ensure that the receiver receives the message as a single message. Else we need to write your our own protocol stack where in you write reference number and number of messages for the receipient to understand and recreate the complete message; which is not very tough. We can use byte arrays with headers and the messages can be sent as base64 encoded.

Also I dont know much about the limits the carriers enforce on the number of segments in multipart message; based on my test I was able to send and receive 160*8 segments properly. Based on the GSM standards the segments can be upto 255 but that count might depend on the service provider implementation.