Anything’s better than MMS, to be honest
SMS sucks. And by extension, MMS sucks too. We’ve been trying to get rid of both for a long time now, and while a comprehensive replacement exists in the form of RCS, it has been hard to get everyone on it. Some industry players even stubbornly insist on using their own thing (*cough* Apple *cough*). All that means we still have to message some people over SMS and MMS. Unfortunately, sending videos and photos over MMS is not a pleasant experience, resulting in some bad compression. But Google seems to be working on a better solution for the former, and it involves none other than Google Photos.
9to5Google has come across an in-development setting in the latest Google Messages 10.4 beta. Specifically, there’s a setting called “Google Photos,” with a description saying “Share sharper clarity video in text (SMS/MMS).” It seems that once the feature is live, users should be able to automatically send videos over Google Photos instead of relying on MMS.
Presumably, the app will upload the video and then automatically share a link to it as a normal SMS. It might also have some kind of integration to show the video right in the app if both sender and receiver are using Google Messages (although if both of you are using Messages, why are you not using RCS? Unless it’s broken again). This seems to be a new feature specific to text messages, as RCS chat messages already support higher-resolution videos.
It’s a pretty clumsy workaround, as it’s basically the same thing as uploading a video on YouTube and sending someone the link. But depending on your carrier, the maximum size for sending videos over MMS can be anywhere between 1 MB and 3.5 MB, which is really tight. This often results in videos being absolutely murdered to reach those sizes, looking blurry and choppy to the receiver, as we detailed in this post.
Despite the clumsy nature of the workaround, videos can be delivered to the sender in an actually viewable state — even if they might have to switch to another app or website to watch it.
We don’t know when this feature will be released, if at all. It’s still in development, so don’t expect to download the app and get it on your device right now. It might arrive in the coming months, though.
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