size & poor quality video issue

[ShaggyKids]

Hi there, I have a Motorola Stylus, my brother and sister have iPhones. Brother lives in Alaska and sends us very neat videos by text but on both my Android and sister's iPhone the videos arrive very small (about 1.5"x2.5") and poor quality, grainy & blurry. Anyone know a fix for this? I use Textra for my text app but just checked in Android Messages and it's the same. Sister would be using whatever the default text is in iPhone.

Since it's happening on both Android and iPhone I know it's not an Android only problem but hoping someone here has experience and a fix for this since Android is affected.

Thanks, everyone!
Deb

 

[joeldf]

It's a limit from the carrier. Because MMS uses mobile data, carriers force the size and quality down to a smaller file size.

You can't do anything about that.

Only way around that is to not text it. Use another messaging service that others here could recommend. Or email, or share a OneDrive or Google Drive or Dropbox link.

 

[ShaggyKids]

It's a limit from the carrier. Because MMS uses mobile data, carriers force the size and quality down to a smaller file size.

You can't do anything about that.

Only way around that is to not text it. Use another messaging service that others here could recommend. Or email, or share a OneDrive or Google Drive or Dropbox link.

Thank you so much, joeldf!

 

[methodman89]

I get around this by using Signal messages with my fruit laden friends. Or email it.

 

[B. Diddy]

The reason why videos sent via texting from iPhone to iPhone look much better is because it's using the proprietary iMessage platform (which is not available for Android). When iMessage sends a message to a non-iPhone, it falls back on the ancient SMS/MMS protocol, which has the size limitation mentioned above. Android has RCS (Rich Communication Services) now, which does allow for much higher quality video transmission between any device that has it (essentially Android's own version of iMessage), but Apple declines to adopt RCS -- Tim Cook's solution for those who lament the incompatibility is to "buy an iPhone." So helpful.