iOS 10.0.2 sms & imessage rich links?

Correct... 'Tap to load preview' is a bad bad bad user experience for everyone.

I have a work-around by removing the 'http://' before the web address in you messages. That makes the link appear like a normal link again. Unfortunately, recent iMessage update have created a buggy issues sometimes - not recognising the links unless exiting out of the message and going mack in again. Once recognised the link, all future messages from that sender will be good though, but all new senders still got the same issue.

Anyways I would love a fix of either of these link problems. (Just killing that BIG grey box with: 'Tap to load preview' would be the simple solution)

When I text a URL on my iphone (ios 10) to Person A the website thumbnail preview shows up perfect. But when I text the exact same URL to Person B, the preview does NOT show at all on my iphone. The preview does show up fine on both of THEIR phones (one is an iphone, the other android).

Does ios 10 cache thumbnail previews?

How can this be explained or resolved?

Additionally... some times links I sent to iphones are received but NOT displayed as a link at all (much less preview image). They are just displayed as static text with no hyperlink at all. So to access the site you actually have to click, hold, copy and then go paste it into Safari.

Is anyone else having problems with ios SMS like this?

I was texted a link to use from my PC to connect to my work in the event of an emergency, I can't see the address to type it into my PC browser so it would be great if there was an option to turn off the tap to preview as not always do I want to open a URL from my phone.

You can't turn it off. You are sending just the text, but iOS 10 recognizes that it is a link and does the work of displaying a preview for you. If you send a link to somebody who is running a previous version of iOS, it will display as a link to them but still show this preview to you. Other mobile OSs have their own ways of recognizing and displaying links and the new preview of the web page will not cause any compatibility issues. If you copy the message, it will also only copy the link as text.

I would also like to disable the preview. It's the opposite of helpful, I can't actually tell what the link is about unless I click on it. A generic image for a website that has millions of different videos/links/articles is not helpful. When I used to be able to see the whole link in just text format I had more of an idea of what my friend was sending me before I clicked on it. "Tap to load preview" makes it even more pointless. If you must have these images, at least make the whole link visible! Not just the main part of the link.