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Comment by drngdds | Hacker News Reader

You're missing a couple important things:

- It's not just bubble colors, those don't matter. What does matter is that image and especially video quality are absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android, and almost all iPhone users in the US use iMessage instead of another platform like Whatsapp, so the experience tends to suck on both ends when texting between an iPhone and Android. It's all for vendor lock-in and it helps no one but Apple. Look up the "buy your mom an iPhone" bit.

- Not everyone cares about the private property rights of a trillion dollar corporation. I definitely don't! I think Apple can get fucked, and I think it's cool if people find ways to exploit their APIs to do things Apple doesn't want them to do.

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  What does matter is that image and especially video quality are
  absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android

That's funny. Today I sent a full resolution picture from my iPhone to someone on another continent using an Android and it came through just fine.

Oh. You mean MMS sucks? Why don't you complain to your carrier then? As of 2023 American carriers support attachments of roughly one megabyte. But the CTIA recommended supporting attachments of at least five megabytes… *checks notes*… back in 2013.

Remind me why this is an Apple issue?

  I think Apple can get fucked

Ah. So it's not about attachment quality it's about your dislike for Apple. Got it.

You forgot about video.

Nah. The CTIA recommended support for H.264 video in 2013. But a megabyte of H.264 isn't going to get you very far. There's no technical limitation here on size or format since MMS is just SOAP over WAP and SMTP. That's why you see the odd MMS provider supporting OGG and whatnot.

The poor MMS experience is entirely down to carriers creating a mess of it, just like they did with RCS. Or have you forgot that T-Mobile had to run (and probably still is, but I'm too lazy to check) both a Google and non-Google RCS stack to get a semblance of interoperability?

Here's Verizon's list of supported file formats:

https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-15892/

Wanna bet that they mean MPEG 4 part 2 and not MPEG 4 part 10?

Not sending high quality video via MMS isn't an Apple issue, it's a carrier one.

> Not everyone cares about the private property rights of a trillion dollar corporation

What's the threshold below which we should care?

As a jumping off point, lets say any corporation with a valuation less than a trillion dollars (Which literally more than 99.9% of all corporations would fit under this umbrella)

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