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There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Crazy to think this is just because of a different colored bubble
It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife's pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.
That's the carrier requiring really rediculously small sizes for MMS.
If I remember correctly AT&T is still limiting videos to 2MB tops. Which is crazy.
And Apple forcing shit quality on ALL MMS, even when the carrier allows higher quality/size.
iOS can't send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It's a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn't seem to have an MMS size limit.
What's really frustrating is MMS is just a web server on the other end. Since the time of data connections (~2005) vendors could've easily made it so MMS on data-capable devices is transported to the web server over data rather than through the voice channel frames (which is what SMS and MMS do).
Though if you had a data-capable device back then, you had to get a data plan to send MMS, so apparently this is what they were doing. They just don't want to upgrade the MMS hosting servers and have the extra traffic.
I mean, I have the same problem on Android talking to android friends who don't use an rcs-coompatible messaging app. Which is more rare than it used to be, but still.
Again, that's the carrier limitation at that point.
If you were both on Verizon, which doesn't seem to have an MMS limitation, this wouldn't happen.
Which exposes that Android can do it, when the network allows it, while iPhone never can.
What? iPhone can do it. If the network allows it. Same as Android.
Also. Verizon has severe MMS limits. Which are less severe if you're using their proprietary app.
https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/
T-Mobile has a 1MB limit for MMS
Right, there you go.