No Picture Messaging (MMS)

By the standards of the day, the SMS app on the original iPhone was actually pretty great, presenting text messaging conversations in a nice chat bubble-style view similar to Apple’s then-popular iChat app for Mac. However, one feature that it was conspicuously missing was support for Multimedia Messaging Services, commonly known as MMS.

Many carriers referred to this as “picture messaging” since MMS allowed users to send photos and videos by text message. It was a pretty common feature on a lot of mobile phones — even many “feature phones” offered support for it — so it was an odd omission considering that photography was a big focus of the iPhone even back then.

Apple added MMS support to the iPhone 3G the following year, although only for sending photos and not videos, but even with the new iPhone software updates, it never came to the original iPhone.