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Comment by simfree | Hacker News Reader

The file size limits on iOS for MMS are far below what most carriers permit, making photos and videos sent from iPhone look much worse when sent via MMS.

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Doubt that. AT&T still limits attachments to 1 megabyte for picture, video, and audio files. That's not an iOS limitation. I just sent an animated GIF to a Google Voice number and it was compressed to about 800 kilobytes.

I suspect the people whining the most are communicating with folks that have "Low Quality Image Mode" enabled on their iPhone.

https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1041906/

Below are the limits per carrier. You are correct AT&T is 1m. The iphone has a limit of 200k which can be raised to 300k. Parent was correct.

https://www.infobip.com/docs/mms/message-types

The other thing though is that even if attachment limit were not a thing, I don’t think it’s spec compliant to send a video codec other than 3GP or whatever the format is formally called (ironically it’s a QuickTime format dating back to when 3G was an exciting up and coming standard and the iPhone didn’t exist).

If you sent an h.264 for instance, many flip phones would be unable to play it. So I think the MMS standard itself is holding us back.

I still blame Apple. If they prioritized the experience of their own customers above the value of the blue bubble in getting teens to bully Android users they could have obviously been the ones pushing a good RCS implementation with carriers by threatening credibly to drop MMS support. Instead they left it to carriers and Google who each screwed things up pretty well.

H.264 is indeed part of the MMS spec. As for which carriers support it, who knows.

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