MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.
So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.
I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.
Must be a regional thing. Where I live in Europe, MMS were just too expensive to use regularly, roughly 5-10x more expensive than SMS, and they came roughly around the time when phones were slowly getting simple email clients and usable data (GPRS and sane pricing).
I’m around 30, I grew up with a dad who was a fan of modern phones and technologies (first camera phones, Windows smartphones, PDAs) so I always had fancy phones, and I’ve received < 20 MMS in my whole life.
That might be it then. I'm around your age from the US, and the cell phone plans I grew up with were not prohibitively expensive, even for my somewhat modest household.
I remember MMS being used here (Poland) as, essentially, faster postcards. Most people would only use it when on holiday to send pretty pictures to their family back home.
MMS has always been extremely rare here, and I am around ~30 years old, so I guess it depends, of course. Personally I have never received, nor have I known anyone who has either received or sent a single one that was not by accident.
Ah then I was very wrong, you are in fact a bit older than me :)
Thanks for teaching me a new thing about life outside of the US. Out here, cell data plans (which is the budget that sending/receiving MMS would eat into) were relatively affordable (even for my somewhat modest household) through the latter half of the 2000s and early 2010s. And now it's basically assumed that most people have "unlimited" data. So I guess MMS was a regional phenomena based on prices.
You didn't miss out on much, not that you probably thought you may have. MMS was a useful tool for sharing pictures digitally, but it was somewhat poor user experience waiting for it to reach the other person. Sometimes waiting for a reaction for an hour because the person on the receiving end wasn't near enough to a cell tower owned by their provider. Less of an issue with all the cell towers around now, but there are better mediums than MMS now.
Until 2010 I worked for Route Messaging (now they are called Telesign) on internal systems as well as integrations with mobile operators and other "messaging brokers" around the world.
MMS was indeed order of magnitude more expensive than SMS and several orders of magnitude less used.
Reasoning for such high prices was more about mobile internet/data back then being really expensive "1G" - and MMS was (still is I guess) using mobile data to send/receive "multimedia messages".
At this point I expect that cost of MMS is more about maintaining legacy systems/servers for that.
Although in something like 2008/2009 integrating through legacy SMS protocols (those previously used by beepers/pagers) was cheaper than through modern protocols. Some operators had hardware boxes supporting those that were already paid off long time ago.
So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.
I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.