Edit: NOTE, I am the receiver of the texts.
So many people asking me to have my wife do something different on her end.
Beloved, she is on iPhone because she doesn’t want to do anything “weird.” She is texting from her phone number using her texting app. That’s what’s going to happen.
Now, why can’t I get iMessage on my android phone? If it’s just a messenger app why not make it available for Android?
I’d use it.
Its due to compression of the video in order to fit on a MMS message, which is very small. Android uses RCS as a new message standard that can send bigger files but Apple has yet to add it to their OS. Its similar to how Apple uses iMessage to do the same, however this is not a standard and is locked to only apple devices.
Apple is supposedly adding support for RCS during the new iOS update but until then you can use a different messaging app to send better/larger files.
I recommend Signal as it is easy to sign up and start using while also being private.
It’s not private given that they require your phone number to sign up.
I think you are confusing private with anonymous. One can be private without being anonymous.
Also messenger apps like Signal often have a setting to send higher quality (less compressed) videos which are bigger in size.
In signal it’s Settings > Data and storage > Sent media qualify
+1 signal fills the gap perfectly
I like and use signal, but of course the problem is convincing someone else to start using it in order to send you a message.
I’d hope that’s not terribly hard when the people in question are married to each other.
Wait until you have to merge dishwasher loading preferences into a single save file.
+1 for Signal. I converted everyone in my friends and family circle to it …except one person, but I just ignore their texts.
Texting happens over MMS. MMS is plain terrible. I think the size limit is 160KB or something like that. There are also resolution limits. My carrier has turned off MMS support a while back, so I can’t even receive media like that anymore.
iMessage works around that by not using SMS/MMS unless it really has to. Same with Google’s RCS implementation, actually.
Hopefully, once RCS for iOS lands, you’ll be able to have a modern texting experience with your wife. Until then, stick with apps like Signal, who have been developed after 2005 and therefore can carry more than four pixels of video.
It should be noted that RCS won’t be encrypted (unless both ends use the Google messages app) so it’s still worse than iMessage or Signal. However at least the memes will work.
I understand all this, but how ste the videos actually sent if it’s neither RCS nor a link (which could have any resolution).
MMS? Like caveman?
In this case, Apple and the wife are both to blame. This is
- ancient technology
- that was never really used anywhere
Come on.
Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.
And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.
If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.
And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.
Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.
I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.
Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US
SMS have been used extensively around the world. That’s texting in it’s original form. And we still use SMS to bootstrap WhatsApp or Signal.
But MMS? Phones and carriers have supported this long before smartphones, but did people really use it? Are MMS free in the US? Because in Europe, before WhatsApp and Signal took over, the was a price tag on SMS (last non-zero price I remember is 0.09€, now free) and MMS (no idea because no one uses it, but I believe 0.39€ was typical at some point).
Hopefully, once RCS for iOS lands
Only a few days left, now. Well, depends on whether your carrier allows it.
I thought the whole point of iOS was that carriers couldn’t decide about pre-installed software?
Unless you mean “if your carrier supports RCS services”; in that case a lot of people are in for a disappointing surprise.
I think the option isn’t part of the current carrier profiles, so the carriers have to update those and submit to Apple.
I think RCS comes with some autodiscovery capability (by sending a request to a magic HTTP URL over the right APN, haven’t read the spec in a while) but it does make sense that carriers push it in profiles as well.
You’ll need a third party messaging app. Like Signal or WhatsApp.
Yeah, why the hell is OP using SMS?
Probably because they’re from the U.S. where SMS is still used extensively for messaging.
Apple doesn’t do RCS. This should be changing soon, but for now you should be using another messaging app, because everything you send is unencrypted and shittier quality
It also depends on the carrier. Girlfriend has iOS 18 Beta and RCS option is missing.
Keep a stock message on your phone to cut and paste whenever an iPhone user sends you a potato-quality video. This is mine:
Please don’t send video to me via iMessage from your iPhone. In fact, you really shouldn’t send video via iMessage at all. Video sent by Apple looks terrible on non-iOS phones. This is not a shortcoming of other phones, this is entirely Apple’s fault and is their explicit intention. If you want to send a video from your iPhone, you can open the Photos app, tap the share button, and select “share as an iCloud link”. That will enable All users to view your glorious video of your cat/kids/dinner/vacation/rant/whatever in the high resolution that your overpriced phone is capable of. Another option is to send the video using a messaging app such as Signal or WhatsApp. Alternate messaging apps are what most of the world use in lieu of text messaging.
This is a form letter response and you will get it every time you send me video from your iPhone via iMessage.
P.S. I love you
What a great way to let your friends and loved ones know you are insufferable to deal with and will drop a rant on them about your minor inconveniences at every opportunity.
Hey, it worked! They stopped sending him videos in low res. In fact they stopped sending him videos all together.
Apple intentionally makes iPhone-Android interoperability crap in order to sell iPhones. That’s not conspiracy theorizing, Tim Apple blatantly admitted to it.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility
There’s a solution nobody has mentioned yet, which is using an iMessage bridge application (allowing you to message iPhone users over iMessage). If you have a machine running MacOS, I just started using one called OpenBubbles that works great and, unlike other bridges (AirMessage or BlueBubbles), doesn’t require you to spin up and run a Mac as a server.
Alternatively, iOS 18 drops this month and has support for RCS, as some have mentioned. This is assuming you use Google Messages…
signal is the way
SMS/MMS has really low file size limits, and iPhones may downscale a little more aggressively than required.
Just pick an internet based messaging service. I like Signal, but they all work.
The next version of iOS should add support for RCS which should allow for cross platform larger images as well.
RCS from what I can tell still has some significant limitations, like the version common on Android having some Google proprietary extensions it’s not clear if other vendors will fully support. I’d still recommend something like Signal to most people, though RCS improves the experience for those not using that.
It’s all a huge mess… Apple is complying with the RCS spec, but isn’t using Google’s proprietary encryption method because it’s proprietary. Google also won’t open the API on Android to allow for 3rd party RCS apps. So until Google decides to abandon their stronghold over the encryption standard and API access, RCS will continue to suck from a privacy standpoint.
I haven’t been following the RCS story closely. My impression is it’s a standard core on which each provider can tack on nonstandard extensions, and somehow carriers are involved even though it’s internet-based. It sounds like people who won’t adopt third-party internet messaging apps are going to continue to have a bad time.
Welcome to 2008, apple
To be far, apple has had iMessage since 2011 and no one cared about RCS until it was adopted on Android in 2019.
To be additionally fair, Android still has phones out there in use that still dont have the RCS feature, and never will because those phones are no longer supported.
The same is true of iPhones
With a 5 year support cycle on iOS devices getting OS updates, ALL of the iPhones going back to 2019 (when it was added to android) will likely support RCS
i have an iphone xs (2018) that’s getting rcs, even
Because imessage is proprietary and apple is against it being publicly available and a standard.
(So are Google’s extensions to RCS)
Yes but it wasn’t marketed that way. Which is why there is more interest.
Apple has been blatantly obvious that they want it to remain proprietary and exclusively on their hardware.
This is true, Google has cared less about the hardware and more about being the platform to run all of it. Not all that different than Android in that regard.
I’m still not sure why people are so quick to jump on board though. You can degoogle Android, it’s much harder to degoogle RCS.
Fucking honestly - it’s the theme for their whole product line
Do you mean should add RCS as in they’re expected to, or should add RCS as in “that would be wise”?
It is expected, it is already in the betas but may also require carriers to enable it as some beta testers found it wasn’t available to them initially.
iPhones tend to have pretty shit cameras compared to Samsungs - it’s not just purely a question of pixels but lense quality as well.
That’s hilariously out of touch with reality and also not the issue he’s talking about.
Anything over MMS gets compressed insane amounts.
I have an iPhone and whenever my Android-owning friend sends me something, it’s a tiny thumbnail of a photo. So yeah, goes both ways.
That wouldn’t be an issue today if Apple had started supporting RCS, the replacement for the old SMS/MMS system years ago like every Android phone. Instead of trying to strangle it by acting like iMessage on iOS was the only solution.
RCS has been around since 2008 and got Universal Profile specifications in 2016.
It took Google until 2019 to get RCS out, and they include proprietary Google extensions that may or may not be supported by other providers, further complicating rollout of RCS.
They’re genuinely not somehow way better in this regard.
Well I’ve been able to RCS with basically everyone on an android phone since 2019 with almost no issues. That’s 5 years now.
I don’t really care how Apple wants to try and justify it. The answer is they don’t want to add support for an alternative to their walled garden proprietary system that no one else can use. They want to force everyone onto an iPhone and iMessage if possible. The only reason they’re even looking at RCS support now is because of regulators starting to look at their glaring lack of support for interoperability.
That’s because almost everyone on an Android phone is using Google Jibe for RCS, they even turned it on through software for carriers that didn’t support it. It’s not surprising that a Google competitor didn’t jump to implement Jibe.
Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T all ditched their own RCS, they also use Google RCS. They’ve positioned themselves central to the entire stack.
And absolutely zero users care about the reasons. They only know that sending messages back and forth is dogshit.
The source of the lack of support across is Apple not wanting to even try because they want everyone to use their proprietary system on their devices instead. Google at least implemented a system to get RCS support to as many devices as they could, even when carriers didn’t do anything to help. Apple instead had to be threatened by regulators before they even began to consider looking at it.
“As many devices as they could” with Google at the center of nearly all of it (and if you want all the features, you want the Google one). This isn’t done out of altruism.
The trick is to send a link to the photo or video instead of the actual file. This is also how iPhone users can use FaceTime with people on other platforms.
Use Whatsapp or another 3rd party messenger. It’s annoying but an easy solution.
So many people asking me to have my wife do something different on her end. Beloved, she is on iPhone because she doesn’t want to do anything “weird.”
Assuming using a third-party messaging app is “weird”, then she can’t send you video with acceptable quality. That’s how it is.
She can’t fix that. You can’t fix that. None of the readers here can fix that unless they work at Apple. This may improve in the future when Apple adopts RCS, but there’s a lot that real-world implementations of RCS do that isn’t in the standard, so the full details of interoperability are uncertain until we see it in the wild.
Now, why can’t I get iMessage on my android phone?
Because Apple doesn’t want you to. Apple wants situations like this one to pressure people to buy iPhones because that’s apparently easier for some people than agreeing on a messaging app.
Send the video over a messenger instead?
Apple isn’t doing everything it can to optimize the quality of videos iPhones send or receive over MMS. Video quality between Android phones, even over MMS, is much better.
