Is it possible to force a link to actually become a hyperlink in SMS?
The "linkification" is actually handled by the SMS application on the device, not by anything within the message. If their device is not changing it to a link, then the device is not parsing the links correctly for all top level domains. There is nothing you can do about it really. The only thing that I could think of around this is to use some link shorter that will show as a clickable link and send those, but that is a lot more work because now you need to generate the shortened link first.