I just got off the phone with over 3 different “Apple Senior Support Specialist” which refer to theirselves as “Tier 2” tech support for Apple products. Neither of them could answer my simple question which is what is the iMessages filie size limitation? The iMessage recipients (iPhone 11 Pro, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone 8) of the videos I am recording from my phone, are complaining about the extremely blurry videos they are receiving. As if that’s not enough, I also receive like 95% of the videos shot on other iPhones blurry. They are definitely being extremely compressed. I literally cannot make out the faces of the people in the video. I made sure all iPhones I was either sending or receiving iMessage videos from, had the following:
Low Power Battery mode disabled
Low Image Quality mode disabled
Low Data Mode disabled
I also made sure they were all connected to various high speed home wifi networks. Tested them disconnected from wifi as well. These phones are on Tmobile, AT&T, and Verizon. Tried Verizon to Verizon. Tmobile to Tmobile, AT&T to AT&T. Nothing worked.
The work around I did find completely on my own without the help of these “Tier 2” Apple support personnel was ensuring the videos I was sending we’re around 19MB in total size. You may ask yourself how did I check the video file size. I used a free app cal Investigator. Extremely easy to use and no ads or anything. As you can imagine you have to trim the videos to be short. I’m not satisfied with this. Im POSITIVE that 2 months ago and for the last 8 years I was not having this issue with iMessages compressing my videos anywhere near as bad as they have been doing recently. I cant make this up. Cannot make out some facial feature due to how pixilated these videos are.
Code Block | The “Tier 2” Or “Senior Apple Support Specialist” literally wasted my time and caused a huge inconvenience. Telling me to reset my network settings isn’t a big deal, but telling me to reset my phone was a huge inconvenience. Yes my data remained on my phone, but every setting from your phone and text rings, to your individual app permissions had completely been reset. It took me about 3 days of heavy use of my phone to truly great all my settings back to how I had them. The “Tier 2” support specialist ended up escalating my case to the engineer level and emailed a case ID so that I can get response back from their engineers. Why is it that ALL wireless network providers make their SMS/MMS file size limitations public information, but Apple iMessage doesn’t? The idea of paying 1000+ dollars for an Apple phone which cannot send the high quality videos to another phone is ridiculous. Obviously Airdrop is an option but that only works when both are co-located. |
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| I will update this forum once I hear back from the Apple engineers. If they can’t fix this I want full refund on my phone. Otherwise I have no contract, phone is pad in full, and I am tech savvy enough to make the transition to Android. I’ll use the free Verizon Messenger app which states clearly any video sent through their app has a a file size limitation of 100MB. Its Verizon’s version of iMessage. Works just fine! |
