626
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
626 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
34092 readers
209 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Holy crap. Now my uncle can stop complaining about degraded quality when Android users are in message rooms. When it comes to tech, he really doesn't care about the culprit. He just complains that people aren't playing in Apple's walled garden.
I don't message anyone with an iPhone. Other than the different colored bubbles what does it do? How is the quality degraded?
It just seems like Apple kept it separate so their obsessed fans would have something to feel superior about.
The biggest thing is attachments like photos/videos.
While MMS pretty universally sucks, Apple is very aggressive with the compression they apply to attachments over MMS so the resulting user experience is garbage akin to what we used to have when MMS was new.
Modern phones from other manufacturers will make use of the full MMS attachment size available, typically 100MB or more (depending on your carrier) iPhones will compress that video down to a couple MB regardless of the higher capacity available.
The biggest issue I've heard of is that message size is very constrained, so photos and videos are reduced to postage stamps.
iMessage is a rich communication layer backed by HTTPS and web sockets so think something like WhatsApp or Telegram; you can send 2 gig files, embed maps and other rich content, etc etc. SMS is well… SMS. So the blue versus green bubble is a dumb reductionist view but the practical impact is visible in say video messaging, where an iMessage can attach a 50mb 4K H.265 clip same as a real messaging app, whereas an MMS will be a 256k 3gpp potato.
iPhones don't support multimedia messaging over anything other than SMS. On Android when you send an image to someone you're sending the actual file (the original file with all its bytes intact). If you try to send it to someone over SMS it'll just goes "nope, you shouldn't do that you should send the actual file", and seamlessly intervenes and just does it.
But since IOS can't receive files, instead preferring to use their proprietary AirDrop system which they don't feel like making available to other developers, Android phones are forced to send it as an SMS. Problem with that is there is a max file size and the image has to be heavily compressed in order to fit.
So then iPhone users (who typically know less about technology than my grandmother) start to complain about the terrible quality of Android photos, even though it's actually an issue with transferring the file, and it's not Androids fault. So what's going to happen is that next year the quality of Android photos is massively going to jump really weirdly 🤔.