The two group conversations I have on my iPhone that I interact with most are MMS, and often (once a week or so) I will miss part of a conversation and have to piece together what the heck is going on. More often I have a problem where messages send/recieve out of order (even if I'm stationary or using Wi-Fi calling to send), or one message will send and once will bounce so the recipient will get a picture with no context or a caption with no context.

None of us are on the same messaging services (besides Discord I guess, but that doesn't have good notifications), so we can't switch. This is on AT&T, but Verizon and T-Mobile have the same problem.

I've had issues receiving SMS messages for no apparent reason, despite living in a major city and keeping my phone charged. I went down a rabbit hole with some support people once on it and we never found the root cause.

SMS messages work almost all of the time which makes it really irritating when they don't.

You’re right it is very rare that it doesn’t arrive. But I’ve lost friendships or at least severely disrupted them the few times sms didn’t work. It’s not just that it didn’t arrive. In one case it was days late (yes, days). In that case, the delay turned the original message from a casual one into an insult.