• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.
• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.
• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.
It’s not the color of the bubble. It’s the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn’t iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife’s pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.
That’s the carrier requiring really rediculously small sizes for MMS.
If I remember correctly AT&T is still limiting videos to 2MB tops. Which is crazy.
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I mean, I have the same problem on Android talking to android friends who don’t use an rcs-coompatible messaging app. Which is more rare than it used to be, but still.
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What? iPhone can do it. If the network allows it. Same as Android.
Also. Verizon has severe MMS limits. Which are less severe if you’re using their proprietary app.
https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/
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T-Mobile has a 1MB limit for MMS
Right, there you go.
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So, it’s an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it’s not iPhone-iPhone, rather than “incompatibility”
No… When you send a “blue bubble” photo on an iPhone the file size is around 1.5MB. When you send a “green bubble” photo I think they’re resized down to less than 300KB.
Any photo larger than that won’t be delivered by some carriers. Also while iMessage photos default to HEIF format - the same compression algorithm as Blue Ray videos - MMS uses JPEG which doesn’t have a target file size feature. All you have is the width/height in pixels and an arbitrary “quality” scale.
To guarantee your photo will never be over 300KB you need to set the width/height/quality to a number that will often be under 100KB… and that’s what Apple does.
Android has a size setting, and you’ll get a delivery failure error if you set it too high for the recipient’s carrier… a lot of carriers do support larger photos… But Apple doesn’t bother with that - they want it to “just work”. Which means 100KB for green bubble photos.
The reality is quality is always going to suffer - converting an image from HEIF to JPEG is a bad idea - it’ll never look anywhere near as good as the original no matter what resolution or quality the compression is set to.
Also… iPhones don’t even take ordinary photos… by default every “photo” is a short video. When you send those to another iPhone, they get the video. Green bubbles either get a still image or worse a 100KB five second video.
… So it’s still an iPhone issue … Also, i really don’t know what this “blue bubble”/“green bubble” is referencing (other than it being chats)
If you own an iPhone, when you’re texting with a person who uses iMessage, your outgoing messages have a blue background. When you’re texting with someone who doesn’t or can’t use iMessage (usually because they use an Android device) your outgoing messages have a green background. And since the message backgrounds are kind of shaped like speech bubbles from comics, they’re called bubbles.
The design is noticeably worse for the green bubbles; the contrast isn’t as good and the color scheme doesn’t seem to match as well as with the blue bubbles. And the fact that it’s the iPhone users’ outgoing messages—not the message of their recipient—that show up in this lower-fidelity way has a pretty powerful psychological impact.
Ostensibly the color difference is so that users know when their messages are being encrypted. But in reality, it seems pretty clear that Apple keeps this in place as a marketing tool, to encourage peer pressure so that users encourage other users to get iPhones.
And it works. Studies and reports keep coming out showing that, among high school students particularly, peer pressure against Android users is considerable; and even for adults, it’s not uncommon for Android users to be left off of group texts entirely.
There are other, more meaningful differences: like the fact that non-iMessage users receive photos and videos in much worse quality (which Apple’s upcoming RCS support should fix), and chats are only end-to-end encrypted between iPhones (which Apple’s implementation of RCS probably won’t fix). But the green and blue bubbles (which RCS definitely won’t fix) are, by Apple’s design, the thing that everyone is hung up on.
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Yes. That’s exactly it
I have the same problem sending to a slew of Android friends from my Android phone. It depends on the phone they have, messaging app, and carrier.
I mean, I guess the above is partially correct but it’s also not the whole picture. But Apple = bad so it doesn’t matter, right guys?
It depends on if they’re using RCS or not.
Right but the discussions here are all about Apple having crappy MMS support or whatever.
The discussion shouldn’t be about what phone has subpar MMS support, it should be about why we’re still using MMS/SMS in the first place. Google has developed RCS and Apple has developed iMessage. The difference is that Apple has already decided not to release an iMessage client on Android, while Google has made public and private attempts to get Apple to adopt RCS instead of using MMS as a fallback.
Just as a side note, I don’t think either corporation are the “good guys”, but my desire to get E2EE and full resolution photos and videos cross platform make my goals temporarily align with Google in this particular case.
Well, obviously. It’s just a protocol. Why wouldn’t they be able to make it cross-platform if they wanted to?
If they’d sent a link instead of the video itself you’d have seen the whole thing though.
Which is more convenient?
And this is 2023, why shouldn’t I be able to just send a video straight to another person if they’re the only one seeing it?
I don’t support big grey making that decision for me
You’re missing my point, but it looks like you’re not the only one. Your friend should have sent it differently.
I mean you just missed your chance at clarifying said point in the very comment I’m about to respond to.
Try again?
They’re saying that MMS is trash and everyone should know that by now.
Might be the only thing he’s been right about, but poor writing skills make his statement… let’s say, ambiguous.
Nah I’m good. I’m not getting paid to be your tech support here, if you’re not going to pay enough attention to understand plain English that’s on you.
It’s cool silly, at least I’m able to write cogent statements.
Original statement was
All you said was a half-coherent statement about sending a link instead, to which I attempted to respond. Now you can’t handle getting called out for having spaghetti for neural pathways, and here we are. Let me know if I need to buy you some crayons for further explanation.
Good luck in life, looks like you’ll need it 🤭
And blocked. I sincerely hope you’re not teaching those kids to behave as poorly as you do.
If you block someone for winning an argument against you, you usually shouldn’t announce it for the world to see.
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Yes, but iPhone people are typically pretty tough to convince. The “it just works” branding is so strong that they think any flaw must be in the non-iPhone user.