... I'm with the same carrier that I had when I was on my iPhone and had 0 issues with this. And I used to send MMS to non-iphone users without any compression. It's definitely an Android issue, and it's not carrier based.
But it may very well
be carrier-based; there's just not enough information available to determine it. I see you are using Nexus 4, but what carrier? Perhaps yours doesn't yet recognize the N4 and it defaults to "legacy MMS-capable" ... some explanation of that hypothesis is quoted below.
I'd be curious to know the APN settings for your equipment, both previous and now, in particular the MMSC which may be different than your carrier and may also be different on your different devices. Others here using your same MMSC may test to see if they are getting similar results as yours, albeit with different phone numbers as sender/recipient.
From
Wikipedia :
'Once the MMSC has received a message, it first determines whether the receiver's handset is "MMS capable", that it supports the standards for receiving MMS. If so, the content is extracted and sent to a temporary storage server with an
HTTP front-end. An SMS "control message" containing the
URL of the content is then sent to the recipient's handset to trigger the receiver's
WAP browser to open and receive the content from the embedded URL. Several other messages are exchanged to indicate status of the delivery attempt.
[6] Before delivering content, some MMSCs also include a conversion service that will attempt to modify the multimedia content into a format suitable for the receiver. This is known as "content adaptation".
...
'The method for determining whether a handset is MMS capable is not specified by the standards.
A database is usually maintained by the operator, and in it each mobile phone number is marked as being associated with a legacy handset or not. It can be a bit hit and miss since customers can change their handset at will and this database is not usually updated dynamically.'
...
'
Content adaptation[7]: Multimedia content created by one brand of MMS phone may not be entirely compatible with the capabilities of the recipient's MMS phone. In the MMS architecture, the recipient MMSC is responsible for providing for
content adaptation (e.g., image resizing, audio codec transcoding, etc.), if this feature is enabled by the mobile network operator. When content adaptation is supported by a network operator, its MMS subscribers enjoy compatibility with a larger network of MMS users than would otherwise be available.'
