Searching for definitive constraints on iMessage video attachments. Through experimentation, it would appear that there is a file size limitation of around 25MB, although I have read accounts of 224MB being the limitation. There are many publications stating there is a 3:30 time limit on videos, but that is easily debunked. If sending an iMessage, while attaching a video from the message editor using the camera roll option, iMessage will prompt to trim the video attachment and then contrain the length to about 4:15 (in 720p 30fps). If I thry to send the same video (original length about 11 mins) from the camera roll using the share sheet (sharing to iMessage) it does nothing when the send button is pressed. Very frustrating to not be able to find any definitive doc on these contraints from Apple given the new iMessage app framework. Any insight greatly appreciated.
iMessage Video Size/Length Constraints
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:
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.
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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. 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!
Confirmed this was never an issue before and is a huge issue now. Previously, you could send with no size limitations and HD quality video and it never compressed it.
My guess is the carriers wanted to save money on bandwidth and data usage so worked a deal with apple to constrain video size/quality via iMessage.
One of my biggest selling points of telling others iPhone is better was the fact you COULD send uncompressed video via iMessage. You can’t anymore though
As recently as January 2024 I have been able to send videos via iMessage that were ~1.5GB. besides iOS updates the only thing that is different is that I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro and now it doesn’t work. I regularly use the developer betas.