Group chats on android

How to Send Group Texts with Android

Text messages are many people’s preferred method of keeping in touch. Quick, reliable, and simple, SMS messaging has gained in popularity long ago and is still a widely-used communication format. Sometimes, however, you want to notify multiple people about the same thing. Sending the same message to friends/family/coworkers over and over isn’t the most time-efficient way to go. Luckily, group texts are a thing in messaging. Here’s how to do it properly.

Why SMS?

You may wonder why you’d want to send a text message to a group of people instead of using a wide variety of online chat apps, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc. Well, the answer here is also a question. Do you ever use text messaging for sending individual messages? Yes, most likely, you do resort to the SMS format in certain instances. Why? If you’re in an area where a WiFi connection isn’t available and you’re using mobile data, a simple SMS text will save you a lot of data and time in sending the message.

So, the instances where you’ll want to resort to group text messages can occur and knowing how to send them can go a long way in helping you organize things.

How to Check if MMS is Turned on for Your Phone

If you’re wanting to send a group chat, here’s how to check is MMS is turned on for your phone.

1. Navigate to your default Messages app on your Android device.
2. Now, click on the three vertical dots menu, sometimes called a hamburger menu.
3. Now, scroll down and select Settings.
4. Next, click on Multimedia Messages (MMS).
5. Ensure that Auto-retrieve and Group Messaging are turned on.

The steps to check if MMS is turned on for your phone may vary from what is shown here. There are many different GUIs for the various Android operating systems in use, so you might need to look through your Settings menu to find it.

How to Send a Group Text on Android Phones

Well, first you’re going to launch the native Messaging app on your Android phone.

Of course, this app comes with the device and relies solely on your network to send and receive text messages. Because of this, you need to make sure that you have proper network access at the moment. If the “bars” on your phone’s home screen are full, start by creating a new message.

In the contacts selection part of the New Message screen, tap the contact icon. This may vary from device to device, as most manufacturers come up with their own interpretations of the Android OS.

Now, select the contacts that you want to group-message by tapping their contact icons. Finally, simply type the text message, as you would in any other SMS messaging instance and tap the send button. That’s it, you’ve successfully sent a group text message to the contacts that you’ve selected.

Is It Really a Group Chat?

Unfortunately, unlike the case is with iPhones, Android phones can’t really create group chats when it comes to SMS. iPhones can send photos, videos, reactions, and other things via the native messaging app using the internet, thanks to the iMessage feature. What iMessage also does, is it creates a group chat every time you try sending a group message. This works similarly to online chat apps. Every iPhone user gets every text message sent in the group chat.

On the other hand, sending a default group message from an Android phone will simply send that message to the selected people individually. They will all receive the message, but they won’t see who else you’ve sent it to and you’re the only one who will receive their replies. So, no, sending a group message does not mean starting a group chat on Android phones. The new Android users may need some time to adapt to this.

Can Android Do Group Messaging?

Yes, even without using third-party online chat apps. However, this requires the MMS protocol, meaning that this is a pricier option.

1. To change group text settings to MMS, navigate to Settings.
2. Then, go to Advanced, and turn on the group MMS option under Group Messaging.
3. Now, turn on the Auto-download MMS option, this might also be called Auto-retrieve.

This means that you can now essentially create group chats for your friends/family/coworkers. Everybody in the group chat will be able to see the SMS, or rather, the MMS messages that appear in it. Of course, as mentioned, this is a more expensive option, as MMS messages cost significantly more than the SMS do. Regardless, there you have it, this is how you can create a group chat on Android phones.

So, how is this going to work for other chat recipients? Well, quite simply, whether the person in question is an Android or an Apple user, their messaging options for that particular chat are going to switch to MMS. This means that anytime they send a message inside the chat in question, they will be actually sending an MMS instead of an SMS.

How to Leave a Text Group Chat?

You are probably used to being able to leave a chat on Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Skype, and other popular chat apps. Well, you can’t actually leave a group text chat because you can’t really remove yourself from the group. What you can do is prevent your phone from receiving notifications from the group in question. Do this by entering the chat in question’s options and toggling the notification settings off. You can also delete the chat thread if you wish to.

Text Messaging

As you can see, creating a group chat using Android’s native messaging app is very much possible. Although iPhone users do have it better in these terms, by simply enabling the group MMS option on your Android device, you too can enjoy group text chats.

Have you tried enabling the group MMS setting? Are you still using the text group messaging? Feel free to tell your own story. What do you like about it? What are the downsides? Feel free to hit that comments section below.

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10 best chat room apps for Android

Chat rooms don’t get the love they once did. AOL Instant Messenger, IRC, and other similar chat services don’t really exist much anymore despite the spike in data-driven messaging services. However, there are still some excellent chat room experiences out there if you know where to find them. There are a ton of messenger apps that allow for group chats. In fact, very nearly all of them do to our knowledge. However, those apps rarely have public chat rooms to join and engage with random people. If all you want is a group messaging, we might recommend our best messenger apps list linked up just below. Otherwise, let’s check out the best chat room apps for Android!

The best chat room apps for Android

Amino

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Amino is a popular chat room app similar in scope to apps like Band or Discord. There are a variety of communities for a variety of topics and you can create your own if you want to. Discord likes to cater mostly to gamers, but Amino likes to cater to as many people as possible and that’s probably why it’s so popular. In any case, you can explore the app, join communities, chat with people, and customize your profile. However, people stay for the various extras like Instagram and Snapchat-style stories, the ability to add polls and quizzes, and even watch videos or read blogs. It’s a weirdly neat all-in-one style chat if you’re into that sort of thing.

Price: Free

Band is a popular group chat app with a focus for general topics. You can create ones for work, sports, games, school, video games, family, friends, etc. It has features that work for almost all of those kinds of things. The actual chat experience is very similar to your standard chat app so there are no surprises there. The app doesn’t have public chats like many others. However, there are plenty of organizations and groups that use this so you may run into it on your own eventually. We would like some more power over things like notifications because this app sends a lot of them, but otherwise it’s a very decent experience.

Discord

Price: Free / $4.99 per month

Discord is one of the most popular chat room apps on the list. It’s predominately for gamers rather than normal folks. However, normal folks can use it as well. It’s just a chat room app with a lot of features so don’t feel like you only have to use it for gaming. This one mostly dabbles in private chat rooms, but there are some public chats out there if you search for them. Some other features include voice channels, direct messages between individual members, and you can join as many servers as you want to. It’s also entirely free to use. The $4.99 subscription only adds cosmetic extras like GIF emotes and the ability to use any emote on any server.

Grouvi

Price: Free

Grouvi is a bit of a wild card on this list. It’s newer, not very popular, and we don’t know a lot about it. However, it boasts a classic public chat experience with a number of chats for a variety of topics. There seems to be a trend toward tech savvy topics like ethical hacking or Linux. This is definitely not some random dating site chat room style of app. It wasn’t overly active during our testing, but again it’s rather new and there aren’t a ton of people. It may be fun, it might not be, but only time will tell. In the meantime, the app is free with no ads or in-app purchases as of the time of this writing.

Price: Free

ICQ is one of the classic chat room apps. It underwent several changes over the years. It now functions like your standard chat apps do these days. You can direct message, video chat, and all of that stuff. However, it also still offers random public chat room similar to the old AIM or IRC services. There are chats for students, new users to ICQ, people in their 30’s, people in their 20’s, people from various parts of the world, some late night chat rooms, and a lot more. Those looking for the classic late 1990’s, early 2000’s style chat rooms should look no further because ICQ still has them after all these years.

MeetMe

Price: Free with in-app purchases

MeetMe is a cross between a dating service and a chat room app. It boasts a load of active users, but they aren’t well distributed between genders. Thus, it’s not great as a standalone dating site. It’s a good way to meet people, though, and you do get into chats with random strangers so it technically fulfills the qualifications. It is one of the weaker options on this list, though. The app claims to be for all ages, and that’s ridiculous. It’s obviously for adults only. It’s acceptable occasionally, and the large number of people increases your chances of finding interesting people. However, we’d probably recommend one of the other nine chat room apps first.

Telegram

Price: Free

Telegram is one of the most popular messaging apps on the list. It functions primarily as a private chat app with group chat functionality. However, you can create chat rooms in the app (referred to as channels). These channels are private. However, tons of organizations, people, groups, etc make their chats public for the sake of communication. You can also create channels and share the link with whoever to create your own. It would be awesome if Telegram had a public chat room community, but the private chat room community is so good that it’s almost just as good. You may just need to search around for readily available channels on Google Search.

Viber

Price: Free with in-app purchases

Viber is like a much more popular version of Nimbuzz. It focuses mostly on text chats, voice calls, and video chats along with fun stuff like stickers, group chats, and other stuff. You can also make phone calls to landlines Skype style for a nominal fee. However, it does have a selection of public chat rooms for meeting new people, discussing topics, and stuff like that. You can find chats for basically anything or you can create your own and people will join eventually (probably). The in-app purchases are for things like the regular phone call fees and sticker packs. The majority of the service is completely free to use.

Whisper

Price: Free

Whisper is one of the few classic chat room style apps with some popularity. It boasts a community of 30 million monthly active users and chat rooms for all sorts of fun topics. Additionally, you can find chat rooms popular on the service, stuff happening nearby (location permission required), and the newest chat rooms on the service. The biggest difference is that it uses a tweet-style posting system instead of a standard chat UI. That makes it different for sure. There are also a sizable number of negative people who say and do negative things, but how much that matters depends on your tolerance level for that kind of behavior. It’s fun, but it has its problems.

Zello

Price: Free

Zello is a dual purpose app. It has a walkie talkie feature with a push-to-talk style that lets you communicate with basically anybody on the fly. However, this one also has a variety of chat room style features as well. You can create public chat rooms or private ones with up to 6,000 users at once and you can use the PTT function to actually talk to them ham radio style. We don’t recommend this for your standard, old school Internet chat room experience. However, it does have its own charms.

If we missed any great chat room apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!

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