For the better part of two decades, "picture messaging" was one of the headline features carriers loved to print on a plan brochure. Unlimited talk, unlimited text, and — crucially — MMS, so you could send a photo of your dog or a video of your kid’s first steps straight from the Messages app. It felt like the natural upgrade to the humble SMS.
In 2026, that feature is fading into the background, and in some places it’s being switched off entirely. If you’ve bought a SIM or eSIM recently, you may have noticed that MMS gets barely a mention, if it’s mentioned at all. This isn’t an accident or an oversight. MMS is going out of style for a stack of reasons that have been building for years, and the trend is only accelerating. Here’s what’s happening.
The technology never really kept up
MMS — the Multimedia Messaging Service — was designed in an era when a "large" photo was a few hundred kilobytes and phone cameras topped out at a couple of megapixels. That design shows its age badly today. Most carrier networks cap an MMS at somewhere between a few hundred kilobytes and about a megabyte, and to squeeze a modern photo into that box, your phone aggressively compresses it. The result is the grainy, washed-out image everyone has received at some point: technically a photo, but a sad shadow of the crisp original sitting in your camera roll.
Meanwhile, the photos and videos people want to share have ballooned. A single image from a recent smartphone can easily run five to twelve megabytes, and a short 4K clip is measured in tens or hundreds of megabytes. MMS simply cannot carry that payload without mangling it. When the core job of a service is "send media" and it can no longer send media well, obsolescence isn’t far behind.
Rich Communication Services took over the job
The most important reason MMS is dying is that a genuine successor finally arrived and got real traction. Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the carrier-backed standard built to replace SMS and MMS. It lives inside the phone’s default messaging app — Google Messages on Android, the standard Messages app on iPhone — so there’s nothing extra to install. It runs over your mobile data or Wi-Fi rather than the old messaging channel, which means it delivers high-resolution photos and video, read receipts, typing indicators, and proper group chats that behave the way people expect.
For years RCS was stuck in limbo because Apple refused to support it, so the two halves of the smartphone world couldn’t talk to each other in anything richer than SMS/MMS. That changed with iOS 18 in late 2024, when Apple finally added RCS to the iPhone. Suddenly a message between an Android phone and an iPhone could travel over RCS instead of falling back to a compressed green-bubble MMS. The big carriers support it, dozens of networks worldwide support it, and cross-platform end-to-end encryption has begun rolling out in 2026 as a beta, tied to carrier support. RCS still isn’t perfectly universal — it depends on the right combination of device, app version, carrier, and region — but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
The apps got there first
Even before RCS matured, most people had already voted with their thumbs. WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Signal, and Facebook Messenger quietly absorbed the vast majority of media sharing over the past decade. These apps send full-quality photos and videos, handle huge group chats, sync across devices, and never charge a per-message fee because they ride on your data connection. For an entire generation of users, "sending a picture" has meant opening an app, not tapping the carrier’s messaging service.
SIM plans are becoming data-first
This is where the story circles back to your plan. The fastest-growing corner of the market is data-only SIMs and eSIMs, and they are deliberately stripped down. A data-only plan gives you internet access and nothing else — no phone number, no voice minutes, no SMS or MMS allowance. Travel eSIMs lean into this hard, because the economics are simple: negotiating international voice and SMS agreements with hundreds of carriers is complex and expensive, while data roaming is standardized and cheap.
And here’s the kicker — for most travellers and increasingly for everyday users, that trade is invisible. You lose carrier MMS, but the messaging apps you already have all work perfectly over the data connection. The thing MMS used to do is done better by something you already have open.
Carriers are actively retiring it
The clearest signal that MMS is on its way out is that carriers have started switching it off. In Germany, the major operators shut down MMS entirely in mid-2026, following others that retired it years earlier. As older network generations are sunset and everything moves to IP-based communication, maintaining a legacy service that a shrinking number of people use becomes hard to justify.
How it’s playing out in Australia
Australia is a good illustration of how uneven this shift is. None of the three major network operators — Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone — are removing MMS from their standard mobile plans outright. But a clear trend is emerging among smaller providers, the MVNOs, to restrict the feature or quietly switch it off.
Here’s how MMS is currently being handled across the Australian market:
- Disabled by default. Many MVNOs, such as Aussie Broadband and Dodo, now turn MMS off by default when you sign up for a new plan or port your number. Because most image sharing has moved to data-based apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, and RCS, providers do this to cut wholesale costs and combat spam. Customers usually have to contact support or update their APN settings manually to switch it back on.
- Outbound MMS unsupported. Users frequently report that Lyca Mobile does not support sending outbound MMS on its Australian plans, though receiving picture messages is generally still possible.
- Virtual / VoIP numbers. If you use a softphone or VoIP provider (such as Crazytel) for a secondary mobile number, these services almost universally don’t support MMS at all.
- Data-only SIMs. Dedicated data plans — like those Aldi Mobile offers for tablets and mobile broadband devices — explicitly exclude all traditional voice, SMS, and MMS services.
Major prepaid and postpaid providers such as Boost Mobile, Aldi Mobile (on its standard phone plans), Optus, and Vodafone still include unlimited MMS as a standard feature. So if you find MMS has stopped working after switching providers, the most likely explanation isn’t that the service is gone — it’s simply been toggled off by default on your new account.
What this means for you
Practically speaking, the disappearance of MMS is a non-event for most people, precisely because better tools have already taken over. A few things are worth keeping in mind: if you rely on data-only or travel eSIMs, don’t assume traditional texting is included — check the plan details and lean on messaging apps for media. Keep a minimal talk-and-text line active if you still need SMS for two-factor codes. And if your cross-platform texts still look low-quality, make sure RCS is switched on.
MMS had a genuinely good run — it was the first taste most of us got of sending something richer than plain text over a phone number. But it's quiet exit from your SIM plan isn’t a loss. It’s a sign that mobile messaging finally grew up.