topic Re: Sms character limit in Android

Sms character limit

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 20:20:41 GMT

Why is there a 160 character limit on Android devices?

Re: Sms character limit

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 20:25:23 GMT

I guess to stop them turning into mms messages which cost more & will charge outside of your allowances

Re: Sms character limit

MI5 — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 20:50:14 GMT

Not sure what you mean as the limit is nothing to do with Android. A standard SMS is 160 characters long. This is the standard that applies to any phone, on any network in the World using standard GSM.
It was limited to this due to the technology available at the time it was invented (maybe 25 + years ago) and was followed by EMS which we now know as MMS which allowed more data to be sent in a single message.
Wiki explains is as this:
Transmission of short messages between the SMSC and the handset is done whenever using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol.[43] Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet.[44] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters. GSM 7-bit alphabet support is mandatory for GSM handsets and network elements,[44] but characters in languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Cyrillic alphabet languages (e.g., Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, etc.) must be encoded using the 16-bit UCS-2 character encoding (see Unicode). Routing data and other metadata is additional to the payload size.
Taken from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

Re: Sms character limit

Cleoriff — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:16:17 GMT

And a standard SMS will allow 480 characters (160 x3) before it converts to MMS (Multi media message)

#justsaying lol

Re: Sms character limit

MI5 — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:25:26 GMT

@Cleoriff wrote:
And a standard SMS will allow 480 characters (160 x3) before it converts to MMS (Multi media message)
#justsaying lol

3 standard sms messages

A standard sms will always and forever be only 160 characters.

Re: Sms character limit

Cleoriff — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:42:10 GMT

@MI5 wrote:
@Cleoriff wrote:
And a standard SMS will allow 480 characters (160 x3) before it converts to MMS (Multi media message)
#justsaying lol
3 standard sms messages
A standard sms will always and forever be only 160 characters.

Yeah. That's what I meant

Re: Sms character limit

MI5 — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:47:01 GMT

Thought so