Verizon customers using Android phones report that they receive blurry images through text messages on different services and apps, with no response from Verizon as to why.
Verizon Communications is the second-largest wireless carrier and the largest LTE network operator in the United States, estimated to serve nearly 145 million subscribers.
Some report that the blurry photos problem on Verizon started in February 2024, but user reports escalated in May following a recent software update from their vendors.
This has led many to speculate that an update in Verizon's MMS system, possibly involving multimedia compression changes, was recently rolled out more widely, causing problems.
An employee of US Mobile, which uses both Verizon and T-Mobile cell towers to provide service, indicated that this has been a known issue on Android phones since the transition to the Warp 5G network.
However, as of writing this, there has yet to be an official confirmation about the exact source of the problem.
Blurry images for Android users
According to multiple reports on Verizon's support portal and Reddit discussion boards, numerous customers have received blurry images when multiple images are sent to their Android phones in a single message.
"All of a sudden the photos I receive via text are blurry on my S21. The word on Reddit is it's a Verizon issue," reported a Verizon user on their support forums.
"Perhaps a Verizon/Samsung issue. It's happening across Android devices - regardless of age - on old and new phones, fancy and less fancy."
The issue does not impact image quality when a message contains only one image or multiple images are sent in separate texts.
Apart from the blurry static images, some users also report problems with animated GIFs, which are now displayed as still images with heavy pixelation.
The problem is not limited to a specific phone model, with people facing issues using various Android devices.
The sender's device also doesn't make a difference, as texting from various generations of Samsung Galaxies, OnePlus, and Apple iPhones are used to send blurry images. However, most users report this issue when sending multiple photos from their iPhones.
Unfortunately, switching to a different messaging app does not help, as the issue persists across other apps, including SMS, Google Messages, Samsung Messages, and Textra.
"Verizon and Android seem to be the common denominators here. I've seen a few different messaging apps mentioned so I don't think that matters as much. For me it happened with Textra and the standard app," another Verizon customer posted on Reddit.
Many impacted customers claim they contacted Verizon's customer support about the issue but received no valuable guidance or explanations about what's causing it.
BleepingComputer has contacted Verizon, Apple, and Google for a comment on the potential cause of the issue, and we will update this post as soon as we hear back.
Possible solutions
It is anticipated that an update will eventually resolve the blurry image problem, so keeping all apps and software up to date is the first step.
A more active step would be clearing the cache and data for messaging apps and retrying the media exchange.
Apps that bypass Verizon's network, such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Telegram, could be helpful for sending and receiving images where possible.
Some have recommended enabling Rich Communication Services (RCS) in all messaging apps where the option is available. However, many say this has not resolved the issue, and it appears to be a Verizon network issue.
Verizon has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, so reporting and escalating the issue to the telco's support department might drive a quicker resolution.
Comments
Xetwnk - 5 months ago
Well, I can confirm that SOMEBODY rolled out SOMETHING, a couple of times this quarter, that would really screwed up some of the basic social media operations on my Google Pixel 7A. Earlier in the year, my Facebook Messenger app started spuriously failing to access images and videos on my phone, so that when I tried to attach an image or video to a messenger conversation, the expected gallery view was blank black. After much fooling around, I discovered the solution was to go into the settings, then disable the apps access to photos, and re-enable it. When it happened once I figured well, maybe a cosmic ray had flipped a bit somewhere. These things happen. Then it happened twice more between say January and March - - and since then, hasn't happened again.
Later, another problem with Facebook Messenger a rose: in an update in mid-May, the one you are probably all familiar with when they started touting and to end encryption and making you opt into cross device synchronization rather than that being the default as it always was before. From that point on, at least for the first week or so, different devices simultaneously logged into Facebook would not see the same content in the same messenger conversation, again a departure from years of tradition and expectation. I have captured video of the two copies of two copies of the same conversation, mostly identical but each missing several items that appear in the other.
As I said, I blamed Facebook, but I hadn't considered the possibility that Google had pushed out operations that had broken pixel or Android behaviors on a broader scale. I don't use other apps significantly, so Facebook and Messenger are my only touchstones.
The question of images coming through blurry or pixelated suggests that bees systems might send a low res version of the photo first, then successively higher resolution data to fill in - quite believable / quite conceivable call back to the days when images came over dial up so slowly that it was beneficial to send only every fourth line, and view it as it came in, so that if the image wasn't what you wanted you could interrupt it without wasting time downloading the whole picture. If something has been broken in the devices or somewhere in the protocol, such that only the low res initial versions come through and the higher res detailed definition gets cut off, you could get the results that are described in this article. That's just my two cents, as a retired old-school software engineer.