Google Messages may soon let you send high quality images over RCS

With Apple adopting RCS in iOS 18’s Messages app on the iPhone, the messaging protocol will replace SMS sooner rather than later. RCS packs several benefits over its ancient competitor, like group chats, emoji reactions, location sharing, high-resolution media sharing, etc., making it a no-brainer in this day and age. For reasons best known to Google, though, its messaging app heavily compresses and shrinks pictures sent over RCS, spoiling the entire experience. Fortunately, the company may soon fix this limitation for good.

Google’s messaging app currently compresses pictures before sending them through RCS. Irrespective of the original resolution, it will not send images over 2,048 pixels tall. With the Send photos faster option enabled, it compresses the photo further to just 1,600 pixels tall, stripping it of all details.

Google is working on raising this image compression ceiling for a better texting experience. The Android Authority team’s teardown of the latest Google Messages APK sheds more light on this. Based on the strings associated with the new RCS image compression settings, the messaging app could allow you to send pictures up to 8,192 pixels wide and tall, with the JPEG quality set to 100. If the Send photos faster toggle is enabled, it will compress images to 2,048 pixels and reduce JPEG quality to 90.

If Google goes ahead with the change, it should noticeably improve the overall quality of pictures you share over RCS. It still won’t be as good enough to catch up to the competition. While WhatsApp also compresses and downsizes photos by default, it provides options to share the image in HD or original resolution.

Blame Google Messages for image compression, not RCS

Interestingly, this compression appears to be a Google Messages problem, as Samsung Messages does not downsize pictures shared over RCS. Android Authority team could also share pictures over RCS with an iPhone without any compression. It’s unclear why the company is compressing images so heavily, especially since there’s no technical limitation.

Here’s hoping Google rolls out the higher image size sharing limit in Google Messages soon to improve the texting experience for Android users over RCS.