What you see is not what you get May 28, 2021 I've realized an interesting dynamic that has happened in the world of phone media. For a long time phone manufacturers have been pushing higher and higher resolution camera and video. This is breaking the cloud storage model that says it's easier to just give it away for free, given storage is so cheap. Now the likes of Google and What's App are aggressively compressing media that is stored to save space. They claim there is no loss and offer no alternative but even cursory testing on What's App shows different. This is a dark pattern in tech, where they sell high resolution cameras, don't actually store that result in the cloud and when you send it on they also cut corners. They want to charge you to store more photos but not other data cause they know photos are harder to manage, but I wouldn't trust that they wouldn't still cut corners for paying customers!