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Comment on There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works

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.

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themoken@startrek.website ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- ripcord@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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    ripcord@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Salix@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    T-Mobile has a 1MB limit for MMS
    
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BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.

This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).

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.

So Apple and carriers are to blame for this.

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bratosch@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
So, it’s an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it’s not iPhone-iPhone, rather than “incompatibility”

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- abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No… on some cell carriers, if your photo is larger than 300KB then it won’t be delivered.
  
  When you send a “blue bubble” photo they are about 3MB.
  
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  - bratosch@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    … So it’s still an iPhone issue … Also, i really don’t know what this “blue bubble”/“green bubble” is referencing (other than it being chats)
    
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    ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    If you own an iPhone, when you’re texting with a person who uses iMessage, your outgoing messages have a blue background. When you’re texting with someone who doesn’t or can’t use iMessage (usually because they use an Android device) your outgoing messages have a green background. And since the message backgrounds are kind of shaped like speech bubbles from comics, they’re called bubbles.
    
    The design is noticeably worse for the green bubbles; the contrast isn’t as good and the color scheme doesn’t seem to match as well as with the blue bubbles. And the fact that it’s the iPhone users’ outgoing messages—not the message of their recipient—that show up in this lower-fidelity way has a pretty powerful psychological impact.
    
    Ostensibly the color difference is so that users know when their messages are being encrypted. But in reality, it seems pretty clear that Apple keeps this in place as a marketing tool, to encourage peer pressure so that users encourage other users to get iPhones.
    
    And it works. Studies and reports keep coming out showing that, among high school students particularly, peer pressure against Android users is considerable; and even for adults, it’s not uncommon for Android users to be left off of group texts entirely.
    
    There are other, more meaningful differences: like the fact that non-iMessage users receive photos and videos in much worse quality (which Apple’s upcoming RCS support should fix), and chats are only end-to-end encrypted between iPhones (which Apple’s implementation of RCS probably won’t fix). But the green and blue bubbles (which RCS definitely won’t fix) are, by Apple’s design, the thing that everyone is hung up on.
    
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s still an iPhone issue of butchering quality when sending over MMS. Carriers are partly to blame, but even on Verizon which has no apparent MMS size limit, iPhones till butcher images.
    
    See my other comments. I’ve tested this. It’s Apple making anything non-iMessage seem inferior. Not that they have to, but it makes people think iPhone is superior when it’s by design.
    
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- bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
  
  It’s obvious they’re restricting the quality but it could be that they implemented the MMS handling in 2008, when other phones could only support 3gp and the carriers couldn’t handle high bandwidth. I’d bet they haven’t bothered to update it since, and do the absolute bare minimum to keep it compliant with the carriers.
  
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  - bratosch@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    With all the so-called innovation and their absurd price tags , you’d think they would’ve updated it in the last 15 years
    
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  - LinuxSBC@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Intentional ineptitude resulting from malice is still malice.
    
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    My Treo on Verizon in 2006 could send 10mb videos.
    
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- Water1053@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes. That’s exactly it
  
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- GigglyBobble@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well, obviously. It's just a protocol. Why wouldn't they be able to make it cross-platform if they wanted to?
  
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db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If they’d sent a link instead of the video itself you’d have seen the whole thing though.

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- RubberElectrons@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Which is more convenient?
  
  And this is 2023, why shouldn’t I be able to just send a video straight to another person if they’re the only one seeing it?
  
  I don’t support big grey making that decision for me
  
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  - db2@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re missing my point, but it looks like you’re not the only one. Your friend should have sent it differently.
    
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    RubberElectrons@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I mean you just missed your chance at clarifying said point in the very comment I’m about to respond to.
    
    Try again?
    
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- BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The funny thing is MMS is effectively a link.
  
  When you send an MMS, it’s uploaded to a server via http where a link is generated. Then the link is sent to the other phone, where the MMS service retrieves the file via that link. We just don’t see it happening.
  
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- ilinamorato@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes, but iPhone people are pretty tough to convince.
  
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