Comment by johnnyanmac
2 years ago
Forget iMessage, I just want media messages from iPhone to not be sub-144p pictures/videos. I know sms is limited but I doubt that's a technical limitation.
And yea, Gamepass was an immediate thought of something a company wanted to ship but Apple blocked. Between that and the Epic Games store it looks like there's gonna be a lot more options to game on IOS by the turn of the decade.
It's not sms, it's mms, and it is in fact a technical limitation.
Honestly we should just sunset MMS entirely. It's like using 56k dialup.
yeah, but the one blocking its sun-setting is apple with their artificial barriers. if apple didn't do it's shenanigans, RCS or something similar with a different name would've have replaced MMS by now.
The only reason there's any RCS interoperability right now is because most carriers have bought into the Google RCS stack. Before that you absolutely had to be aware of which carrier the recipient was using. If memory serves T-Mobile is running both a Google and non-Google RCS stack. RCS is and was a mess.
Hell, if you've a rooted Android you can't access Google RCS and any RCS messages sent your way will disappear into the ether.
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Um no, if the powers that be who control the LTE and 5G (and soon 6G) standards would improve or replace MMS, apple would be forced to improve their ability to send images/videos because they must comply with the standards to have their phone allowed on the carrier networks.
This is a dumb complaint honestly. The carriers and Qualcomm closely control the standards bodies and could address this problem. Instead they focused on the bag-of-garbage that is RCS, which Apple has finally said they will support. But because RCS is a bag-of-garbage, Apple plans to support a different flavor (the basic standard) from Google's. $0.50 says Google will magically start supporting the basic standard too once Apple ships it.
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No, it's not. Carriers limit the attachment sizes quite severely, but that's not an inherent limitation of MMS.
The file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.
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I still want to see Matrix get adopted for messaging by default. Purism actually did it with their Librem 5 (probably one of the few good things about that company, but that's a rant for another day).
That sounds like hell. If you think that carrier interop is bad now, wait till everyone is using a different matrix provider with different optional features turned on or off. At least today there are some barriers to SMS spam, matrix would open the floodgates while making blocking it exponentially worse.
I can count on one hand the number of MMS messages I've ever received.
MMS was much more common before data messaging apps like Discord or Facebook Messenger became some of the normalized places for cell phone chatter, which anecdotally I think that switch started happening (or at least I began recognizing that switch) around the early 2010's.
So I'm guessing you're a very young person based on how little MMS you claim to have received. Which is fine, it's fair to point out that technologies us old folk use may differ slightly from what the whippersnappers are doing. And there are no wrong answers there, except that it's also fair to point out that when you purchase a cell phone, before you install any apps, you have some ingrained cell phone messaging features. One of which is a messenger app built on top of SMS and MMS.
I've probably sent and received thousands of MMS messages over the years, because it was the primary method for a cell phone user to send a picture to your friends and family. Back in the day, at least, and still today for some. It was also the way that us old folk were able to send group texts at a time.
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That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.
The newer RCS standard would be better, but Apple has already announced they're going to support it this year (after dragging their heels for a few years).
No, it's not. It's an implementation detail. MMS is basically just SMTP on the back end. There's no technical reason you couldn't allow much larger attachments aside from cost and shitty implementations.
The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.
This. And it actually doesn't even need to be done through SMTP.
MMS being basically SMS with a link/url to where the phone fetches multimedia part from - it could also be sent via older EMI-UCP (that was originally used for pagers).
At some point pre 2010 (when I worked in Routo Messaging - now called Telesign) we also got an SS7 connection - so we could finally start doing stuff like a real mobile operator/provider.
I guess rephrasing it to a practical limitation of MMS would be fair, though? Insofar as it’s not something we’re blaming Apple for.
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If you pay for iCloud ($4 a month) you can send an iCloud link easily to any video that anyone else can access at full resolution
I realize this isn’t what you are asking for. But it works well and doesn’t depend on Google’s closed version of RCS
Pretty sure Apple will make the recipient sign up for an Apple account to view the content. At least it does this for notes sharing.
EDIT: Tried it on my iPhone and it does not require an Apple account, kudos Apple. It does show my full real name as others have mentioned.
long-time iPhone user here, i did not know this!
thank you for posting!
FYI for those others who don't know: click on a video in your photos app. click share --> "Copy iCloud Link"
Careful, it will leak your real name. It's no good for anonymous sharing.
Indeed, your real name will come out.. but otherwise its a nice feature
That’s via email, right? Or is there something they offer in the messages app now?
you can send the icloud link via SMS or really anywhere, telegram whatever, using the copy icloud link button
Apple opened up the app store for game streams back in January.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-...
Media messages from Androids to iPhones are in fact technologically-limited by MMS. That's not an Apple-imposed limitation, it's written in stone in the MMS standard.
Works fine over WhatsApp/Telegram/…. Not a technological limitation.
I was referring specifically to using the text messaging system, not the Internet.
You still cannot send livephotos via Whatsapp/Telegram. They convert to still photos. So you still lose something there.
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What do you think those have to do with SMS/MMS?
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Please show me where that's written because iPhones have no problems sending full-resolution images to my droid device but I can't do the same to them.