Comment on There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
bratosch@lemm.ee 11 months agoSo, it’s an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it’s not iPhone-iPhone, rather than “incompatibility”
“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.
With all the so-called innovation and their absurd price tags , you’d think they would’ve updated it in the last 15 years
Intentional ineptitude resulting from malice is still malice.
My Treo on Verizon in 2006 could send 10mb videos.
Yes. That’s exactly it
Well, obviously. It's just a protocol. Why wouldn't they be able to make it cross-platform if they wanted to?
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.
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)
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.
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.