This exact thing happened to me last night. A friend got a new number and send a group message out to around 50 people, I then got probably over 100 texts the rest of the night as people had conversations through the group messaging, and I was pretty sure those messages weren't supposed to be seen by me. Thanks HN, now I know why!

This entire bug report is confusing to me. What is your expected behavior?

From what I can gather, you do (or did) not have group messaging enabled. You were on the receiving end of a group message. Replies to that group message also came to you, a recipient of the initial group message. Because you do not have group messaging enabled, the messages which were in response to the group message were not grouped.

I know I sound pedantic, but I do QA. If we're calling it a bug, let's get some expected results and steps to reproduce.

A commenter on the blog post summarized it well. Not necessarily a bug; just bad design:

Group Messaging = OFF Expectation: Messages NOT sent to the Group

Group Messaging = ON Expectation: Messages sent to the Group

But Apple has it wrong ... reversed ... because message sent with GM OFF are sent to the entire Group, and those sent with GM ON are not.

How can that possibly be intuitive/logical/intentional? It's a bug. Crappy design.

So you are saying that when you replied to a group MMS, it didn't only send it to one person? Have you tried this on a feature phone? I believe this is the same thing of which you speak, but generalized about MMS: http://omaskon.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/caution-when-replyin...

I always thought what you turn on or off is the UI for the grouped message roll up for all subsequent replies. You can't opt out of Group Messages that are MMS because they are Group MMS.

¿Am I misunderstanding?

Edit: 1st link was about a Blackberry w/ Group MMS. Here is one for an Android phone w/ Group MMS: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/htc-rezound/183344-replying...

It's not a bug. The problem is that most people don't know that MMS messages can be one-to-many AND that iOS 5 turned Group Messaging on by default (which causes group messages to be MMS instead of SMS).

The Group Messaging setting only affects messages you send out. If a third party wants to (or unwittingly) 'reply all' to an MMS message that included you, your individual Group Messaging setting won't stop that and you will get that message regardless of your setting.

If you don't think it should work this way, then you are asking Apple to not deliver messages that technically are addressed to you.

I do agree that Apple should have done a better job educating users on how it works.

I think this is not the case. TFA seems to say that replying to a many-recipient message sent with Group Messaging off is automatically considered a "reply to all" action when it shouldn't.

Oh wow, I thought this was a static feature.

It drives me insane when my mom sends out announcements to her five siblings and their respective families who all happen to have iPhones. I never see the end of the conversations.

It's bad enough I have to listen to them all compare apps at the dinner table. "Hey Firebrand, how come your game isn't selling as much as Angry Birds is?" Ugh.

> It drives me insane when my mom sends out announcements to her five siblings and their respective families who all happen to have iPhones. I never see the end of the conversations.

I've been there too and wanted to throw my phone against a wall. It's like being stuck in a chat room that you can't exit. Hard to believe Apple didn't notice this.

I've had this happen with a non-smartphone when I sent an MMS to a group of people and one of them had an iPhone (well before iOS5). His replies went to everyone else that I included.

This is with iMessage, not sms, right? AFAIK can't do that with normal sms messages?

That's correct, although I've seen the same sort of thing happen with MMS.

With iMessage, everyone will see "Group Message" at the top of their screen (see blog screenshot), which I think is pretty obvious.

If you've got it enabled...

It's enabled by default.

This happened in iOS 4 as well.

In fact, it happened to me on WinMo phone years ago.

This happened to me, too. However, it seems that this only happens if the two iDevices were actually logged into the same account at some point--so no total strangers.

Logging out of iMessage and back in solves the issue. I've seen it happen with calendars, too.

This is the primary reason I can not recommend Apples online services to anyone.

I think the availability of this setting is controlled by carrier settings as I can't enable or disable group messaging - http://cl.ly/3m2N1m3V3i0O1B0d451s

The title is a little sensationalist, isn't it?

I mean, this would be annoying to encounter and should be fixed, but I don't imagine it'll cause the end of the world, as the title might suggest.

Not only is it sensationalist, but plenty of folks are already aware of this problem. And frankly, I don't think it's that big of a problem. In fact, other group messaging apps do this if you have SMS enabled when data is unavailable.

I personally love this feature. It's how I always imagined group messaging should work. Kind of like a group chat.

Except the part where you don't know who a message is going to. It's very unintuitive.

Yeah, this is the part that's concerning. That and you might not even know it's a group message.

Except for the fact that it says "Group Message" at the top of the screen (see screenshot of blog post).

I included the Group Message screenshot as an example of what it's supposed to look like when it's working right. The first screenshot was how they all came through for me.

That's strange. Group Messaging was turned off in my preferences, but all of mine looked like your screenshot.

Another bug is that this option only exists in the USA. Why?

This is not exclusive to iOS and it is not a bug.

It is if there is no indication that you are replying to everyone though.

Disclaimer: I don't have a fancy phone so I don't know how clear things are.

Just because something doesn't work the way you want it to doesn't mean it's a bug.

True, but an interface that you tend to use for messaging to one person should give an indication that you are, instead, messaging to several.

True, a buddy of mine posted something as a Facebook message instead of a wall post and every reply went to everyone on his buddy list. Soon it was people complaining about getting messages at late hours. Apparently you could 'unsubscribe' from messages on the website but not on the mobile app.

To this day I'm tempted to try replying to the thread to see if will still go out to everyone.