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There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.

• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.

• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.

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[–] 58 points 2 years ago (42 children)

It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.

Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.

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  • [–] 38 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife's pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    That's the carrier requiring really rediculously small sizes for MMS.

    If I remember correctly AT&T is still limiting videos to 2MB tops. Which is crazy.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    And Apple forcing shit quality on ALL MMS, even when the carrier allows higher quality/size.

    iOS can't send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It's a choice made by Apple.

    I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.

    Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn't seem to have an MMS size limit.

    What's really frustrating is MMS is just a web server on the other end. Since the time of data connections (~2005) vendors could've easily made it so MMS on data-capable devices is transported to the web server over data rather than through the voice channel frames (which is what SMS and MMS do).

    Though if you had a data-capable device back then, you had to get a data plan to send MMS, so apparently this is what they were doing. They just don't want to upgrade the MMS hosting servers and have the extra traffic.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I mean, I have the same problem on Android talking to android friends who don't use an rcs-coompatible messaging app. Which is more rare than it used to be, but still.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Again, that's the carrier limitation at that point.

    If you were both on Verizon, which doesn't seem to have an MMS limitation, this wouldn't happen.

    Which exposes that Android can do it, when the network allows it, while iPhone never can.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago

    Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.

    This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).

    iOS can't send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It's a choice made by Apple.

    I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.

    Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn't seem to have an MMS size limit.

    So Apple and carriers are to blame for this.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (18 children)

    So, it's an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it's not iPhone-iPhone, rather than "incompatibility"

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    No... When you send a "blue bubble" photo on an iPhone the file size is around 1.5MB. When you send a "green bubble" photo I think they're resized down to less than 300KB.

    Any photo larger than that won't be delivered by some carriers. Also while iMessage photos default to HEIF format - the same compression algorithm as Blue Ray videos - MMS uses JPEG which doesn't have a target file size feature. All you have is the width/height in pixels and an arbitrary "quality" scale.

    To guarantee your photo will never be over 300KB you need to set the width/height/quality to a number that will often be under 100KB... and that's what Apple does.

    Android has a size setting, and you'll get a delivery failure error if you set it too high for the recipient's carrier... a lot of carriers do support larger photos... But Apple doesn't bother with that - they want it to "just work". Which means 100KB for green bubble photos.

    The reality is quality is always going to suffer - converting an image from HEIF to JPEG is a bad idea - it'll never look anywhere near as good as the original no matter what resolution or quality the compression is set to.

    Also... iPhones don't even take ordinary photos... by default every "photo" is a short video. When you send those to another iPhone, they get the video. Green bubbles either get a still image or worse a 100KB five second video.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    .... So it's still an iPhone issue ...... Also, i really don't know what this "blue bubble"/"green bubble" is referencing (other than it being chats)

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    If you own an iPhone, when you're texting with a person who uses iMessage, your outgoing messages have a blue background. When you're texting with someone who doesn't or can't use iMessage (usually because they use an Android device) your outgoing messages have a green background. And since the message backgrounds are kind of shaped like speech bubbles from comics, they're called bubbles.

    The design is noticeably worse for the green bubbles; the contrast isn't as good and the color scheme doesn't seem to match as well as with the blue bubbles. And the fact that it's the iPhone users' outgoing messages—not the message of their recipient—that show up in this lower-fidelity way has a pretty powerful psychological impact.

    Ostensibly the color difference is so that users know when their messages are being encrypted. But in reality, it seems pretty clear that Apple keeps this in place as a marketing tool, to encourage peer pressure so that users encourage other users to get iPhones.

    And it works. Studies and reports keep coming out showing that, among high school students particularly, peer pressure against Android users is considerable; and even for adults, it's not uncommon for Android users to be left off of group texts entirely.

    There are other, more meaningful differences: like the fact that non-iMessage users receive photos and videos in much worse quality (which Apple's upcoming RCS support should fix), and chats are only end-to-end encrypted between iPhones (which Apple's implementation of RCS probably won't fix). But the green and blue bubbles (which RCS definitely won't fix) are, by Apple's design, the thing that everyone is hung up on.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    It's still an iPhone issue of butchering quality when sending over MMS. Carriers are partly to blame, but even on Verizon which has no apparent MMS size limit, iPhones till butcher images.

    See my other comments. I've tested this. It's Apple making anything non-iMessage seem inferior. Not that they have to, but it makes people think iPhone is superior when it's by design.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Yes. That's exactly it

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I have the same problem sending to a slew of Android friends from my Android phone. It depends on the phone they have, messaging app, and carrier.

    I mean, I guess the above is partially correct but it's also not the whole picture. But Apple = bad so it doesn't matter, right guys?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    It depends on if they're using RCS or not.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Right but the discussions here are all about Apple having crappy MMS support or whatever.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The discussion shouldn't be about what phone has subpar MMS support, it should be about why we're still using MMS/SMS in the first place. Google has developed RCS and Apple has developed iMessage. The difference is that Apple has already decided not to release an iMessage client on Android, while Google has made public and private attempts to get Apple to adopt RCS instead of using MMS as a fallback.

    Just as a side note, I don't think either corporation are the "good guys", but my desire to get E2EE and full resolution photos and videos cross platform make my goals temporarily align with Google in this particular case.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

    It's obvious they're restricting the quality but it could be that they implemented the MMS handling in 2008, when other phones could only support 3gp and the carriers couldn't handle high bandwidth. I'd bet they haven't bothered to update it since, and do the absolute bare minimum to keep it compliant with the carriers.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    My Treo on Verizon in 2006 could send 10mb videos.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Over MMS? Without quality loss? To someone not on the same network?

    No way was Verizon allowing 10MB videos over MMS in 2006. They don't today. And that was the really early days of MMS when you were lucky if anything got delivered.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    As I said, on Verizon. May have forgotten to say to other Verizon phones.

    And yes, they did, and the do. I can send 50mb videos over MMS to Verizon iPhones. I've done it. Last time was last year as another test.

    Verizon doesn't seem to have an MMS limit.

    But keep on gaslighting me and telling me I didn't perform this test between a Verizon iPhone and a Verizon Android that I control.

    The iPhone receives the video just fine. You can even see the size of the video. But when it sends it back, iOS butchers the quality.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    It's not gaslighting to be skeptical. There's way way too much misinformation, guesswork, misinterpretation, etc happening in this thread . Yeah, I'm real skeptical. I even sent you links from Verizon about their limits that you've ignored. That's not "gaslighting".

    Verizon says they currently supports 100MB MMS if you're using their proprietary app. What are you using? And you're not using RCS for this "unlimited" Verizon->Verizon texting you've done recently (since you're saying today they support unlimited)? That also seems weird.

    I can also send a 50MB file over ATT MMS. It doesn't arrive 50MB.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    I just had my Samsung-using friend send me (Motorola) a video on MMS . The quality suuuucked. We're both on AT&T.

    Its totally valid I think to blame Apple for not supporting RCS earlier (and for their reasoning behind it - platform locking). But blaming them for MMS quality sucking is pretty wrong. That's almost entirely on the carriers.

    Edit: actually I'm not even sure it's fair to fully blame Apple. Google is supporting it via their Messenger but only because they're paying for a ton of the infrastructure themselves (and likely justifying it by scraping every single message people are sending with it). Carriers have been notoriously bad about supporting it.

    Might be more valid to blame Apple for never opening iMessage to other platforms. You could also say the same about other messaging system interop limitations, too.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    If they'd sent a link instead of the video itself you'd have seen the whole thing though.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    Which is more convenient?

    And this is 2023, why shouldn't I be able to just send a video straight to another person if they're the only one seeing it?

    I don't support big grey making that decision for me

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    You're missing my point, but it looks like you're not the only one. Your friend should have sent it differently.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    I mean you just missed your chance at clarifying said point in the very comment I'm about to respond to.

    Try again?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Nah I'm good. I'm not getting paid to be your tech support here, if you're not going to pay enough attention to understand plain English that's on you.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    It's cool silly, at least I'm able to write cogent statements.

    Original statement was

    It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.

    Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.

    All you said was a half-coherent statement about sending a link instead, to which I attempted to respond. Now you can't handle getting called out for having spaghetti for neural pathways, and here we are. Let me know if I need to buy you some crayons for further explanation.

    Good luck in life, looks like you'll need it 🤭

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And blocked. I sincerely hope you're not teaching those kids to behave as poorly as you do.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    The funny thing is MMS is effectively a link.

    When you send an MMS, it's uploaded to a server via http where a link is generated. Then the link is sent to the other phone, where the MMS service retrieves the file via that link. We just don't see it happening.

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