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Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

  That is, indeed, a technical limitation of MMS.

No, it's not. It's an implementation detail. MMS is basically just SMTP on the back end. There's no technical reason you couldn't allow much larger attachments aside from cost and shitty implementations.

The last time folks got worked into a frenzy over RCS I ended up looking at the MMS specs. If memory serves 3GPP recommended an upper bound of at least 5 megabytes. American carriers typically limit attachments to like 3 megabytes or less and they mandate ancient video codecs.

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This. And it actually doesn't even need to be done through SMTP.

MMS being basically SMS with a link/url to where the phone fetches multimedia part from - it could also be sent via older EMI-UCP (that was originally used for pagers).

At some point pre 2010 (when I worked in Routo Messaging - now called Telesign) we also got an SS7 connection - so we could finally start doing stuff like a real mobile operator/provider.

I guess rephrasing it to a practical limitation of MMS would be fair, though? Insofar as it’s not something we’re blaming Apple for.

Do we really believe though that Apple doesn’t like it? I believe their top executives are glad it sucks because things like this make people (especially teens) bully anyone who’s not on iMessage, resulting in additional sales.

I think Apple has enough pull with carriers to tell them whatever configuration parameters for MMS they want.

Apple has a 200k limit. We can blame Apple for having the worst mms limits

Prove this, because I'm pretty certain this is not the case. I helped build a messaging app for iOS (Technically a TeleHeath app that needed to accept MMS/SMS also) and I saw absolutely none of this. That was a few years ago so it's possible it's changed but I'd have to see actual documentation for that. Otherwise I firmly believe this is BS and completely made up.

https://videoconverter.wondershare.com/compress/mms-video-si....

I’m curious how you did that, given that iOS doesn’t allow 3rd-party SMS/MMS apps.

No, they don't.

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