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Animated GIFs

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As I read the changelog of the Android Signal app, I found following line:

Raised the GIF size limit to 25MB.

From my perspective, this is a worrisome tendency.

Twentyfive Megabytes are huge. For a single animated GIF, this is really big. Consider customers using the (stupid) animated GIF feature of Signal with their limited data allowances. With an allowance of half a Gigabyte, you exceed your monthly quota (and typically pay horrible charges) after downloading only twenty 25MB-GIFs.

Animated GIFs are a very stupid and inefficient file format. They store each frame separately. Therefore, any (small) movie file is much smaller than the corresponding animated GIF version.

The only advantage of an animated GIF is that any kind of software product is able to visualize images (such as animated GIF) in contrast to poor support for videos.

I'd plead to enable software to embed videos or external sources of videos instead of using animated GIFs. This would save a large amount of data traffic of the Internet these days without skipping all the fun videos.

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