Group texts won't send

@HeavenM 
Thank you for the suggestions, but I don't think they'll help. I'm not sending pictures, I update apps automatically and any time I see updates available--and I keep the phone updated too, my phone is a new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra with almost 2/3 of both memory and storage available, I winnow my texts regularly, and the other messaging app I have tried (Google Messages) is disabled if it's not the default so there are no messages there.

I do maintain about 10 group text strings because they're all groups I communicate with regularly, but I delete everything else within a couple of days. (Side note: I wish Samsung Messages would permit naming groups, as Google Messages does--it would be SO much easier to figure out which group I want to communicate with.)

I also have an occasional issue where a reply to a group comes in as an individual text (contrary to my group settings) with a blank subject and hangs on "Downloading." That plus the problem outlined above really lead me to think this is a T-Mobile problem.

Sending messages in group message already notifies a lot of people so I can see why you don’t want to send multiple shorter messages and cause phones to ring off the hook. lol 

The size limitation for outgoing messages is 1MB. A picture could easily be over that, but I highly doubt two paragraphs of text would get you there, so I doubt that size is the issue here. Since the conversations are ongoing, we know it is not an issue with the phone number or message being blocked by the receiver(s). Good to know that the data is working so we know it is not the multimedia aspect of the message causing the hiccup. I suggest these things from here:

• Make sure that the phone software and all the apps you are using are fully up to date.
• Make sure that you have at least 10% available memory space available on your phone. Once space fills up, everything can start to act funny in different ways. 
• Delete old text messages. AS MANY AS YOU CAN. I especially would start with the conversation threads that are having the most issues (delete the conversations completely if you can). Even if you have plenty of available space on your device, when you have too many messages on your phone, sending and receiving can be unreliable and frustrating. I know that a lot of information in texts can be important to save, so explore the different ways to back up the info before you delete it. You can take screenshots and back those up to a cloud, use a third party SMS backup app, or some other idea that I may not even know about. You mention a few different messaging apps, so I encourage you to delete messages from those as well. 

Deleting messages can be stressful and time consuming, but in my many years working tech support here at T-Mobile, I have seen it work more times than any other tricks I have tried. 

I hope this helps. 

Thanks, fireguy, but I don't think that's the issue or it would happen more often with group texts. This is intermittent, and I use data all the time so it is turned on.

group texts need data to send/receive. are you by chance running into data issues or by chance have it turned off?

group texts/pic texts need data.

straight to the person uses the voice side and not data unless its a pic or overly long text