It’s possible to send and receive MMS over WiFi on Android if your carrier supports it. However, in case your carrier doesn’t support that, you can still do MMS over WiFi. Most Android phones intelligently switches from WiFi to Mobile data when you send or receive a MMS and then switches back to WiFi when the MMS job is done. But, for some users even that fails and their device just leaves them with “Message Download Failed” upon receiving a MMS while connected to a WiFi network.

The classic solution to this problem is using an alternative messaging app from the Play Store. There are a ton of free messaging apps to chose from, and we recommend the Textra SMS app for its beautiful UI and simplicity of functions, plus it has also been reported to fix the MMS issue by a number of users.

So, first off download and install Textra SMS app from the Play Store (download link below)

 icon-download Download Textra SMS

Now do the following:

  1. Open Textra SMS app and go to Settings » MMS Settings
  2. Tick (check) the Prefer WiFi option, this is for those users only whose mobile carrier supports MMS over WiFi, but still give it a go if you aren’t sure about your mobile carriers policies. If it doesn’t works, just untick the option to enable your default MMS behavior
  3. If the above option doesn’t work for you then your only choice here is to use mobile data to send and receive MMS, for that tick (check) the “T-Mobile WiFi Calling Fix” checkbox to let your device temporarily de-activate WiFi when sent or received a MMS
    └ In case this doesn’t work for you, tap on “Manually Configure APN” in Textra, find correct APN settings and change it from your device’s Settings » Mobile Networks » Access Point Names.

Even after failing to send MMS over WiFi using Textra, then you might wanna take this to your mobile carrier’s customer executive.

Send pictures over WiFi via SMS using Go SMS Pro

If sending and receiving pictures over WiFi is is all you need, then there are some other apps as well to do that for you. The Go SMS Pro app lets you send pictures over WiFi via a SMS, costing you even less than the price of a MMS. The app uploads the picture you want to send to its own servers and then sends the direct link of image via SMS to the recipient, which then opens in a browser. And in case, the other user also happens to use the Go SMS Pro app, there’s not even the need to open the image in a browser window, the image just gets downloaded to the recipients inbox and your picture conversation goes seamlessly.

icon-download Download Go SMS Pro

More apps

In case you’ve been vacating on moon, the smartphone apps world has progressed so much in the recent years that MMS has literally became a thing of the past now. There are many messaging apps available on the Play Store that supports sending pictures to other users who also have the same app installed on their phones. Most of the these apps are available on multiple smartphone platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, etc. If I’m to recommend you some, try Whatsapp, Line or Snapchat.