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.)
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Hopefully, once RCS for iOS lands
Only a few days left, now. Well, depends on whether your carrier allows it.
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I think the option isn’t part of the current carrier profiles, so the carriers have to update those and submit to Apple.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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
Because imessage is proprietary and apple is against it being publicly available and a standard.
(So are Google’s extensions to RCS)
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.
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.
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.
You both use Signal, problem solved.
Me and my wife do this and its pretty much the only person we talk to on there.
Its got some nice features to keep track of images and such. I was surprised she went for it really, usually 99% of the ideas I mention to her get turned down lol
Oh forgot to add, we also have android and iOS.
I had to double check that I didn’t write this because those words could have literally come from my fingers.
I’m also the signal guy amongst my friends and family. There are dozens of us!
One of my wife’s friends started a group chat there for some reason. Maybe the facebook app attacked them? Who knows but its catching on!
It’s because Apple has refused to adopt new messaging standards like RCS (not that Google is doing that much of a better job), but it’s purposefully broken interoperability to force people into buying into product ecosystems (iPhone vs. Android) to make you stick with one and get stuck on it.
It’s stupid anti-competitive and I freakin’ hate it.
Literally doesn’t have to be this way, it’s a choice (mostly by Apple, but once again doesn’t mean Google is better).
https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/15/24178470/apple-rcs-support-wwdc-announcement-android-imessage
Apple was largely forced to support RCS in response to the mounting pressure from global regulators and competing companies. That may help explain the somewhat disgruntled approach to announcing its rollout in iOS 18.
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to-switch-on-rcs-messaging-in-ios-18
Here’s a walkthrough to ensure RCS is enabled on your wife’s iPhone, once iOS 18 drops in the next month or so.
Don’t forget to add in the primary reason they don’t want to implement it is exactly because of comment’s like OPs, because it makes it look like Android phones are the problem. Most people assume that it’s because it’s an android it doesn’t work right, and so everyone should just have iPhones. Why fix what is already great marketing for them, even if it is a complete lie?
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Google will also try to block you from their RCS servers if they detect you’re rooted, causing your messages to be silently downgraded. It’s pretty bad.
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A lot of RCS is using Google Jibe, it’s one of the ways they were able to roll it out so fast not necessarily with carrier support. I can’t fault them too much for not immediately embracing it. Based on the Toms Hardware link it looks like they are depending on carrier hubs. For me that means I may not get support for a long time as an MVNO user.
The Google proprietary extensions in their implementation of RCS is honestly pretty crappy imho as well. Neither of these companies are “good guys” in terms of RCS standards.
That’s why I’m kinda hoping Apple would adopt standard RCS and then the ball’s on Google for not cooperating.
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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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Why are you still using sms in 2024?..
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Don’t worry, Google’s own Messages app does the same thing as iMessage, but using a different (and on paper more open) standard that isn’t compatible with iMessage (yet, I think the EU is forcing Apple’s hand).
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the only reason Android was locked out of imessage was Apple, the only reason rcs is locked out of ios is Apple. it’s all Apple trying to keep the wall around its garden.
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.
