SMS and MMS Issues on Ting
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Hello UBPorts community, and thank you so much for your work on the 3a! While I am not new to linux or ubuntu, I am new to actually using Linux on a phone. The setup and everything on the phone appears to be working normally, with two glaring exceptions. I cannot receive SMS and I cannot send or recieve MMS. I have LTE mobile data, I can make and recieve calls and I can send texts. For my carrier, I am using Ting, specifically their T-Mobile branch. I have a newer X3 sim card. I have verified that everything works as expected on both stock Android 9, 10 and 11, as well as on LineageOS 17.1.
I saw that APN issues are a common point of frustration, so I tried to copy the APN from Android/LineageOS in the hopes that I could just reuse them on Ubuntu. There was regrettably no where that I could see for the Bearer information and with just tried filling out the information supplied by Android in the matching spaces in APN settings, I would then hit the Check in the top right and nothing would happen. I figured I must be putting in the wrong stuff, so I then found the actual APN page from Ting (Ting APN Setup Guide and same behavior: enter what information there is for matching spaces in APN settings and nothing happens. It just sits there and doesnt actually save anything. If I go back, nothing has been saved and there are no other options within the APN settings to go forward or alternately save that I see.
I have tried on all the latest builds (stable, rc, dev) with the same behavior.
At this point, I am kind of at my wits end on what else to try to get SMS & MMS working. I feel like it has to be related to APN, but since I cannot get it to save an updated APN (and the autogenerated APNs do not match the information from Ting); therefore I welcome any and all advice on how to proceed. I am happy to find out that I am an idiot and there is something simple that I am missing. TIA
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No MMS here (think this is a bigger bug relating to lack of standards across carriers) ... but I do get SMS inbound. I had luck changing and saving the auto generated APNs. I was never able to create a new one - same problem as you - no reaction on clicking Check box: greys out then hangs without saving. By default, I had one APN for "MMS" created and one for "Internet". There doesn't appear to be any place for some of the other settings from Android like MMC, etc.
One thought might be to track down where these setting are stored and modify / create new ones from the terminal ... although not sure if that is possible.
One other thought: be sure you get a true reboot after making these changes - for me, first reboot attempt restart GUI, second ususally works. Need to do 3 to get a true power off.
Good luck and update us if you figure something out!
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@standupmobile said in SMS and MMS Issues on Ting:
One thought might be to track down where these setting are stored and modify / create new ones from the terminal ... although not sure if that is possible.
The user Aircooled in the thread MMS issues shared that APN contents could be found in /var/lib/ofono/<id> /gprs. It may be better to continue discussion on this specific idea in the original thread, since there is more information there already.
Also for rebooting, are you doing a soft reboot or hard reboot? I haven't tried, but I would think that a full system power off would do what takes 3 reboots.
@mellowmatt I don't remember where I saw this, but apparently there is a difference with having one APN for "Internet and MMS" and separating those into 2 APNs. But it's a moot point if you can't edit or save them. shrug
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One other thing to try... Ensure you are on 3g ...not 4g. For testing and debugging, I setup a few scheduled texts a day. the other day, i was running on 4g and my test test didnt come through. oddly, data was still working. when i switched down to 3g ... It popped in. maybe something else but worth a try.
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Thanks! agree to shift apn discussion over. re reboots: yes, i am talking soft. Hard (power key hold) always brings me to reboot.