Twilio claims they support group MMS conversations: https://www.twilio.com/blog/group-mms-texting-for-businesses
However, the documentation links they provide goes to a 404 page: https://www.twilio.com/docs/conversations/group-texting
I'm trying to figure out of Twilio can support a group MMS conversation among several people on their mobile phones having a conversation with a Twilio number in a group conversation.
If you're on your mobile phone's texting app, and you send a text to multiple people at once, it's converted to MMS and is a group conversation among multiple people. It is not sending separate SMS messages to each person, but rather an actual group conversation.
I've been looking at Twilio's API docs for their Conversations (https://www.twilio.com/docs/conversations), but it doesn't look like they actually support group MMS, or at least I cannot get it working.
The closest I could get was creating a Twilio number participant with 3 other participants, but on each person's mobile texting app, they saw the messages from everyone else come across as just the Twilio number. Effectively it was a "2-way" conversation with the person and Twilio's number, but multiple people could be the Twilio number behind the scenes.
Bandwidth texting service provides actual group MMS, where I can send a message to an array of phone numbers via the to and it works just as expected. The issue is they are expensive with minimum monthly costs I was hoping to reduce.
It's a little frustrating, because Twilio announced in 2021 they supported group MMS, but none of their docs or examples seem to actually implement this.
Am I missing the docs somewhere or need to configure some setting for group MMS?
Group MMS has been put on hold. The ecosystem migration to 10DLC routes introduced compatibility issues at the carrier level, so this issue impacts all CPaaS providers, when using Group MMS over 10DLC routes (which is a requirement for A2P traffic).
Limitation to Group MMS https://www.twilio.com/changelog/limitation-to-group-mms
A workaround is to use Twilio Conversations which will allow a one:many distribution of messages. The only difference is the parties that art part of that conversation won't appear in the mobile devices message client address bar.