[_yb2s]

It’s a huge deal to me as an iPhone user- half my friends and family have android phones and I can’t see the videos, photos, and emojis they send me and vice versa.

I’m not sure how this would not be a big problem for any iPhone user? Do you not send or receive messages?

[javagram]

In the USA, iPhones send videos/photos over MMS when including Android phones in a group conversation. There is a quality degradation but they aren’t missing. This feature works fine for me with the Android users I know in real life.

I wonder if you or your Android counterpart have a cell network issue with the MMS server configuration. This would only appear in cross platform texts, I suppose.

[_yb2s]

The quality degradation can be so severe the videos and photos are mostly useless. They aren't literally "lost" but I've seen videos and photos that looked like a mosaic of large pixels rather than an image or video.

Perhaps the images automatically scale down during poor connection events? That isn't an acceptable behavior, modern protocols just wait, and transfer when they have a good enough connection.

Other things like tapbacks are also not technically lost, but also become useless- it responds with text saying something like "thumbs up" but not which message the response attaches to- so the context is lost, often making it impossible to understand.

[acdha]

That’s exactly the problem, and it’s why RCS users have reported so many problems, too. Cell companies just aren’t great at running servers, which has been good for Google’s Jibe business as carriers decide to outsource the infrastructure to someone good at it.