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Comment by sanex | Hacker News Reader

But they purposely make the green bubble messages worse than they need to be. Videos get sent with a lower than necessary resolution.

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That is simply objectively false. They can’t make the experience any better than it is. In a mixed group, they have to resort to the greatest common denominator which is SMS/MSM. They literally can’t do anything else.

Thank you for bringing this up again. The green bubblers who hitch about this fail to understand the difference between SMS, MMS, and better alternative. SMS and MMS are legacy “compatibility modes” in effect. Apple users happily enter the ecosystem to get away from legacy native messaging with SMS and MMS. It’s not the iPhone that “downgrades” anything, is that the default IS SHITTY, and iPhone upgrades the experience with a better protocol for Apple users. Don’t like your sadness with Android messaging? Switch. Frankly Apple should change the green bubble to brown, like crap, to really remind us of that legacy protocol use.

Even when I used Android phones this would happen if you were misguided enough to send something over MMS lol.

MMS was dated when I had a Motorola flip phone in high school, I’m not surprised it doesn’t handle 4K video lol.

I don't expect 4k but I would expect that when my wife sends a video green with mms and then used Whatsapp to share it with me and I use my android to send the same video to the same group they should be the same resolution but mine is _higher_ even though she took the video.

That's not accurate. The "green bubble" is SMS/MMS. They operate on a standard protocol of decades as a fallback, which absolutely has lower quality.

You can blame your carrier for that.

It wasn't that long ago that MMS too large simply failed, or lived in limbo. I'm not a big fan of low res either, but it's absolutely an improvement and beyond what they need to do.

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