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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Why are you still using sms in 2024?..
I’m not OP but I might as well be. My family has a group chat that exists almost exclusively to send pics/videos of the kids to each other. It’s a mixed group of android/iOS, so the videos come through with 12 pixels. I have begged and pleaded for every key to switch to telegram, GroupMe, Gchat, Facebook… ANYTHING!!
But they’re all on iPhone because they specifically don’t want to be tweaking or customizing anything in their phones.
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.
I think everyone has explained the how and why, but not any real solutions that don’t involve using a completely different application. I don’t have an iPhone in front of me, but with Android you can share as a link to Google Photos instead of sending the picture/video directly. I am pretty sure you can do something similar with iCloud. Have her try the share as iCloud link instead.
Update: I just tested it. I had them open up Photos, go to the image/video, tap the share button, and then if you scroll down a tiny bit there is a share as iCloud link. I was able to view it just fine on my Android phone.
You’ll need a third party messaging app. Like Signal or WhatsApp.
Apple dragged their feet for years in implementing RCS.
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 sms/mms 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.
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.
Cause then you won’t buy an iPhone… Duh
@geometry dash the RCS is not something Apple does. Your messages are currently unencrypted and of worse quality; however, this will be rectified shortly. In the meantime, you are better off using a different messaging software.
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.
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