Group text with iPhones are a pain!

[FuzzyB]

I have an S23U and use textra. Unfortunately, most of my family uses iPhone. In group texts I miss an occasional text from one of them. Doesn't happen all the time but enough. Seems worse lately...plus pictures come through blurry from them. Is this all from iMessage or is there a setting within textra that needs adjusted?....are there other text apps that handle this better?

 

[smvim]

Text messaging has devolved into a huge mess of corporations competing with each other. Apple, WhatsApp, Telegram, Google, etc. all have their own different texting file type protocols that are a bad combination - they're proprietary and not compatible with each other. Despite PR statements otherwise, their priorities are not about providing a useful service to consumers, their focus is on short-term profit. We get screwed and they make money off of that.
So yeah, you're having problems with exchanging text messages between Android and Apple users. That is sadly a given, not something you have control over. Most iPhone users will be using the iMessage app, (using its iMessage protocol), so there is no equal option available for Android users. There is no such thing as an Android iMessage app, Apple's licensing won't allow it. So any Android text messaging app always will involve a lot of translation/conversion when it involves Apple's iMessage. Apple did make a big turn around recently. It will start to include basic support for Google's RCS protocol into its iMessage app. This might be a big game-changer. Just keep in mind that RCS is not an Open Source standard, it's a proprietary protocol owned and managed by Google, and Google's history with text messaging is a consistent disaster of canceled and dead standards and apps.

If you want to share media files without them being automatically scaled down, use email instead. Or use sharable links from your photos/videos stored within an online storage service (Google Drive, MS OneDrive, etc.). Email services don't have the same file size restrictions, but with some video content its safer to use sharable links anyway.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

I have an S23U and use textra. Unfortunately, most of my family uses iPhone. In group texts I miss an occasional text from one of them. Doesn't happen all the time but enough. Seems worse lately...plus pictures come through blurry from them. Is this all from iMessage or is there a setting within textra that needs adjusted?....are there other text apps that handle this better?

Textra's glory days are dead.
My mom has a bunch of iClowns in her CIRCLE, While not the most feature rich, she hasnt complained about missing any messages since I switched her to Samsung Messages.

Apple is 100% to blame for you not getting messages, I'm not just saying that as an Apple hater but objectively. Their proprietary crap is the cause of many headaches like yours and has been for a long time.
Once they are forced to add RCS those issues should hopefully be gone.

 

[SeeBeeEss]

A couple of years old, but I found this to be a pretty fair and balanced explanation of the texting mess we find ourselves in today:​

The cold, bitter truth about the Android-iOS messaging mess​

 

[tube517]

The worst is group texts with pictures being received. My brothers have iPhones and I have Android. When they send pictures sometimes it doesn't show up right away and I get a text from the sender Separate from the group with the "download" notification in the individual text and then once the picture is seen in the group text the separate individual text from the picture sender is gone. Strange but I'm used to it now.