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.
The real reason: Apple intentionally doesn’t support the open protocols that send pics and videos to non-Apple devices. These protocols are a decade old and work great. They use a proprietary protocol instead, which they will not share with other phone manufacturers.
What the average iPhone user thinks: Apple is better than Android!
It’s pretty dumb.
The thing is, Apple phones do support these things, but only if they change the default messenger app, and most Apple users won’t do that. IPhone users are worse than Windows users when It comes to changing their default apps.
Unless I did a really poor job researching it, you cannot change your default SMS/MMS application on an iPhone.
You can use other messaging apps like Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, or AIM. But if you want to use SMS, you have to use iMessage.
Maybe this is US-specific though. Europe often forces Apple to do things they don’t do here.
If you mean changing which app natively gets used for texting, that’s not something you can do on iOS. You can choose to open a different app, but if I tell Siri to text someone it will always 100% without a doubt no way to circumvent it use the standard Messages app. iOS doesn’t let you change your default for texts.
Hell, they only allow you to change your default web browser because they were dragged into court kicking and screaming. And even then, all third-party browsers are forced to use Safari’s engine for the backend, and aren’t allowed to use their own engines. Even Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are just reskins of Safari on iOS. And even then, any apps that open an in-app browser will still use Safari even when your default browser is different. For instance, I’m browsing lemmy on Voyager, and it opens all links in a built in Safari browser, (even though my default browser is set to Firefox.)
Send the video over a messenger instead?
Cause then you won’t buy an iPhone… Duh
Messaging between iPhones uses iMessage and messaging between android probably uses RCS, both of which do not have the limitations of MMS, which is a limit of around 3.5 MB for most carriers. “Texting” pictures and videos from iPhone to android or vice versa will likely use MMS, hence the blurry media. Until Apple joins the party, the solution is to use another app like WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc.
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.
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.
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
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.
+1 for Signal. I converted everyone in my friends and family circle to it …except one person, but I just ignore their texts.
+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.
One of you has a lower res screen so there is a conversion issue on the sending
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
You’re probably getting suggestions for what she should do different because, at least at a starting point, it could just as easily be something her phone is doing before sending as it is something your phone is doing on the receiving end.
I’ve had a phone say ‘video to big, do you want to crop or share through abc app’ before. Don’t recall the exact message, but seems more likely than you phone downgrading something it’s receiving.
Sending multimedia via traditional text messaging uses the MMS service, which is ideal for very low resolution images, like sub megabyte, I didn’t even know it could support videos! Wild.
I suggest you add her on something like Discord, or WhatsApp, LINE, whatever works for you, and send each other multimedia that way :-)
Also depending on your provider you may incur lower costs and faster load times, too.
Apple dragged their feet for years in implementing RCS.
Not that surprising. Google Jibe is the largest player in RCS. Samsung created their own RCS alternative to Jibe and there are a few others, but Google is hands down the dominant platform. Apple had their own thing already, not exactly jumping to integrate Google Jibe or create another product isn’t surprising.
Samsung had support before Google and Jibe… but they have abandoned their own RCS support. Simply because Google’s works on all of their devices and they don’t need to do any development to support it going forwards. Why pay for development and support for a system you don’t have to and get nothing from? No one is buying a Samsung phone for the Samsung Messages RCS capability.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
