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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

> I shit you not there is a large percentage of people in the US that think Android phones are not capable of sending pcitures and videos.

Source? Would love to read this one lol

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It was kind of true a very long time ago except in potato quality. And if you were out of data, but was connected on WiFi instead, you actually couldn't. And you still can't text a large video across the Android / iPhone chasm, can you?

‘Potato quality’ ahahahahahahhaa I hope this was iPhone autocorrect to prove the point.

No, it's an old phrase. It came from the question, "Was this filmed on a potato?" when someone posted a video of particularly bad quality, as if their phone was a potato.

It wasn’t too long ago either. I mentioned it before in prior comments but due to how MMS works at one major carrier (verizon) they sent picture quality back to pre-smartphone days for a large % of android users.

The quick explainer is phones send a user agent with the request to fetch a media message, this user agent contains a link to a file that describes what the device can handle. Apple and Blackberry hosted these files themselves, Verizon hosted most of the android ones on its network itself. They decommissioned the server hosting them a few years ago which made it so all affected devices pulled the lowest potato quality image down for compatibility. Huge number of complaints.

It's a phrase that's been around for years to mean "poor quality" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/recorded-with-a-potato). One theory behind the term is that the recording device was so bad/low-tech, it could be powered by a potato battery.

For smartphones, I think it has always meant you could replace your smartphone with a potato and get the same functionality.

You can send decently sized videos between Android and iOS assuming RCS is enabled. Attachment sizes can now often be up to 100MB, where as with MMS you'd often be limited to maybe a megabyte or two.

I'm regularly sending/receiving gifs and decent quality short videos between iOS and Android these days.

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