Unable to message short videos between my iPhone and an Android contact. But no problems messaging to my phoneless Google Voice tho. My contact is also unable to message me his video files to my iPhone as well. He has a new Samsung smartphone while I have an iPhone 12 mini (just got iOS v18.1.1 a couple nights ago). My video file is only 1.7 MB big. What’s the problem?
Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
Carriers restrict the size if attachments to MMS messages. It seems that Google does not for Google Voice. I seem to recall that my carrier, Verizon, limited attachment sizes to about 1.2 MB.
Use another messaging protocol to send the file (WhatsApp for example.)
Yes, both of us are using VZW. Interesting. Now, really weird. I did get my friend’s video! However, I can’t get any images (small and big) from my Google Voice now. Huh? Is iOS v18.1.1 still buggy or something? Plain SMSes and RCSes work.
I repeat: use another messaging app to send large video attachments. MMS is really not a great solution. The carrier restrictions will make the video files reduced in quality in order to fit within the restrictions.
See as well How can I send video on Google voice - Google Voice Community
And
Convince your friend to use WhatsApp, Facebook Messages, Signal, or any other messaging app.
I think I fixed it by disabling RCS. Hence, why I never had this problem before iOS v18 upgrade. I turned RCS back on, and now it works. I have no idea what’s going on! Did anyone else had this problem before?
For me this never worked until RCS support was added in iOS 18. Before that I could not send any videos to android users.
I think there are different levels of RCS support depending on the recipient—at least for me I’ve seen different preview messages in the typing area on iOS Messages. Some say RCS and some say MMS or other protocols. I don’t do that often so I don’t recall the exact messages, but I know it works much better now.
I did notice SMS and RCS for non-Apple users before typing something in the text chat form.
That’s one of the advantages of RCS over MMS. See What is the difference between iMessage, RCS, and SMS/MMS? - Apple Support
RCS is new with iOS 18, but the problem is that as a user you can’t force a message to use RCS. For reasons Apple hasn’t explained, sometimes the phone will fall back to SMS/MMS and there is no setting to make not to do that.
Until RCS is more reliable in iOS (and has more carrier support, though Verizon is one that supports it), that’s why I suggest using something like WhatsApp if you want to send high quality video attachments.
It happened again, but disabling and re-enabling RCS didn’t fix it like last night. Originally, text chat form said SMS. Minutes later, it said RCS. So wacky. Yeah, RCS isn’t reliable. I think I will just disable it fully to go back to the old ways before iOS v18. Maybe it’s buggy from being new in iOS v18 even though it’s at v18.1.1 now and hopefully v18.2 tomorrow (I wonder if it will improve RCS). :(