SMS Texting with Emoji

[Charles Schwedes]

I have developed a specialized Texting system with my app. Recently I have added Emojis to my alphabet. With no Emojis, I am able to send a longish message, but the length of my message is truncated when using Emojis. A few Emojis work fine with up to about 30 characters but if I use more the receiving AppInventor message is truncated to the last six characters of my message. My messages include any/all ordinary keyboard entries. Are any characters considered illegal to AppInventor? The SMS receiving message is correct! AppInventor truncates the incoming 'Text Message'. I'd appreciate any ideas. Thanks. Charles

[SteveJG]

SMS text messages are limited to 'about' 160 Latin characters, the limit on non-Latin alphabets is less.

Most mobile phones support long messages.  A long message feature splits up messages longer than 160 characters to multiple messages.  App Inventor, to the best of my knowledge has no way to support the so called long message.   If you have more than 60 characters, you must break this up into a series of separately sent sms texts.

Regards,

Steve

[Charles Schwedes]

Steve,

AppInventor does seem to limit the length of sms messages if I use emojis. Without emojis I'm able to send and receive messages longer than 160 characters fine. With a couple of emojis I seem to be limited to less than 35 characters. I noted measuring the length of character is 2 for an emoji, but as expected, an ordinary character's length is 1 so my limit using an emoji to be about 35. Fifteen emojis is ok for that uses less than a length of 35. As I said before if I break the AppInventor's limit it truncates my messgge to the last 6 to 8 characters. Is there anything I can do? Thanks for your help. Charles

[SteveJG]

I understand when using Chinese glyphs and possibly Arabic script, the sms limit seems to be about 35.  These are non-Latin characters.  This compares with the emoji limit of 35 you are experiencing.

I think that Android 4.4 or higher eevices support emoji in their character sets.   The character limit is not an App Inventor imposed limit, it is a limit imposed by Android and whether a device is capable of only sms or mms.   I read some devices automatically convert an overly long sms to a mms  (multimedia sms) to get the longer text to appear.    I only have Android 4.0 on my phone, so I can not test what you are experiencing.   I think also that AI2 can not, on its own generate an mms ..but do not know because I do not have the proper hardware.

The 160 (or possibly 35 or less) character limit is discussed here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=android+sms+character+limit&oq=android+sms+character+limit&aqs=chrome..69i57.6255j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Here is stuff about MMS  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service .

Perhaps someone else has some ideas or other comments for you Charles?

Regards,

Steve