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I see when sending a text message it says the limit is 160 characters. What happens if I go over that? Is the message still sent?
If I insert an emoji I notice the limit drops to 70 characters. Why?
Messages on the Mac doesn't show how many characters are in the message. How do I make sure it's not too long?
iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.0.2
If it's too long it will be split and sent as multiple messages. Emoji characters require multiple ascii characters to define, therefore, the character count is lower.
If it's too long it will be split and sent as multiple messages. Emoji characters require multiple ascii characters to define, therefore, the character count is lower.
iMessage, which is Apple's own internet messaging service, can send fairly long messages (several or more thousand characters at least, but I don't know what the upper limit is - may be file size and not character limited). I'd be surprised if there was not some hard upper limit though, as at some point, Apple would want people to use email, and not an instant messaging service intended for short rapid communications.
SMS texts originally were strictly limited to a 160 character limit. Beyond that, the only way to send longer texts over SMS is to break the message up into multiple messages, send each one, and re-combine them on the receivers handset. That's because the bandwidth used by SMS is a small, unused fraction of the cellular voice channel and it is only so big.
Text message character limit
