So an iPhone-wielding friend wants to send me a picture of her dog. She takes a snapshot and sends it to me as an MMS. Yeah, old school, I know.

Now for some reason, this ends up as a group MMS on my end, in a separate thread from her text SMSes.

And if I reply with a few words, one minute later my phone buzzes, as I get my own message back in the "group chat". And another minute later, it buzzes again, since I now get my own SMS back.

If I want to reply with a picture of my cat, I'm not even allowed to.

The stupid, I don't even.

There are plenty of online advice telling me to open the messages app, click on settings, then on "more settings" which I don't have, or "MMS options" which I also don't have, or on "advanced" which I do in fact have, but below that, I'm still missing any options for group chats or MMSes.

So as far as I can tell, messaging is totally borked on Android - or at least on my Moto G5s. I'll probably have to ditch the cheap piece of crap - sadly, because it is otherwise a decent phone with a good camera, especially at the price. A shame since it's obviously just a software thing, which could have been fixed pretty easily. So, if anybody can point me to a messaging app that has absolutely no support for RCS or SMS+, I'm happy to return to the happy past where things actually worked.