Poor Huawei Ascend MMS Picture Quality

General Discussions
#1

Hi, everyone. My wife and daughter each have an Ascend.

When they send photos via MMS, the photos are highly compressed.

They are using Google Messenger to send the photos.

They receive high quality photos without issue.

I have another android phone with a different carrier and my MMS pictures look great.

From my reading on the web, it looks like it could have something to do with the APN settings on the phone. It appears that the messaging app will query the server to see what size picture it can send.

Any suggestions on how to improve outbound MMS photos on the Huawei Ascend?

Thanks!

#2

There’s no changing the MMS settings, but I’ve found, that no matter the carrier, I get terrible picture quality using Messenger. While this is not officially supported, give another App a try. A good one to try is Textra (Textra SMS - Android Apps on Google Play) I use it with success and find my outbound MMS to be of better quality.

#3

I did some testing today and wanted to share my results.

My son has a Moto Z Play and as mentioned above, my wife has a Huawei Ascend both on Republic Wireless.

I performed two tests using both phones and using Google Messenger.

1st test:

I took a photo using Google Messenger and had it call the camera.

The Moto Z sent a photo with resolution 1728x2304

The Huawei sent a photo with resolution 480x640

2nd test:

I took a photo using the phone’s camera and then attached the photo to the MMS in Google Messenger.

The Moto Z sent a photo with resolution 1728x2304 original photo was 3546x4608

The Huawei sent a photo with resolution 360x480 original photo was 3120x4160

In both cases, the Moto Z photo was just fine.

The first Huawei photo wasn’t awful but the second one certainly was.

Based on my analysis, the culprit doesn’t appear to be Google Messenger.

All photos were received by my Moto X Pure Edition with MintSim as my carrier.

It really looks like something is going on on the Huawei to do something to the photos before it sends them.

This link suggested APN settings were the culprit:

http://forums.androidcentral.com/nexus-5x/607265-poor-mms-picture-quality.html

The APN settings between the Moto Z and the Huawei Ascend are different.

Under General settings…

They both have an APN called Republic with the same settings with the Radio button checked.

The Moto Z has an additional APN called Republic IMS which appears to be IPV6 specific.

The Huawei has an APN called T-MobileData.

In addition to the General settings, there is a section called MMS in APNs. It has an APN called T-MobileMMS.

I’m betting that the Google Messenger application on the Huawei is asking the carrier the maximum resolution it can accept.

Any thoughts before I start messing around with the APN settings on the Huawei?

Thanks!

#4

Submit a Republic Help ticket before you go messing with APN settings. Most everyone who changes APN settings in a search to fix an issue only succeeds in breaking internet/messaging. Include as much information in your ticket as possible.

#5

So I spent some more time with this issue.

I did play around with the APN settings. I reset the APNs to factory, then reinstalled the RW app. Then deleted the T-Mobile APN settings. (Didn’t see the suggestion about contacting support for APN settings until after I messed around with them. Oh well. Seems to be working ok.)

Nothing changed the outgoing photo quality size.

I’m going to make a few guesses about Android Messenger… It’s defaulting to under 100kb message size on the Huawei. From other reading I’ve done, the RW app controls outbound MMS. It could be that Android Messenger is being told by the Republic Wireless app on the Huawei that the limit is 100kb whereas on the Moto Z, Android Messenger is being given a different size limit.

I did install Textra. I was able to set the limit to 600kb and Textra sent an outbound picture size of around 325kb after compression. Textra couldn’t send when I set it to 1MBs so I had to drop the limit back down to 600kb.

I took my Moto X Pure Edition on MintSim and installed Textra. I set the limit to 2 MBs and it sent the file at about 1.9MBs.

Does anyone know what the maximum MMS size is for users on the RW 3.0 plan?

Thanks!

#6
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