Comment by B1FIDO
5 hours ago
Multimedia "texts" are actually MMS. In fact, if you send more than 160 characters, those are also MMS because it's an extension of the SMS standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
Aren’t SMS that are over 160 characters being concatenated? There used to be a standard for that.
Generally yes.
I guess a phone/app could exist that does convert to MMS instead, though, since the app can make that decision.