Google To Patch A Flaw That Lets iPhone Users Have Free Storage On Google Photos

Google will fix a bug in Photos that has been giving users of iPhones free benefits. According to what the company said to Android Police, the flaw allows iOS users to have photos stored in their original quality without taking the 15GB limit into consideration. So, in short, some users have been having free storage for some time now.

Apple uses a more efficient way to store images, which is to make use of the HEIC file format. Google’s JPEG format cannot rival that of Apple when it comes to efficiency, and Google Photos will automatically save the original. So it has been wasting resources and time converting the HEIC file to JPEG.

Samsung devices also have this kind of behavior, but since HEIC is not their default format for photos, it is not used as often as on Apple’s iPhones.

For now, we have not heard anything on how Apple intends to fix this problem, but no matter what it plans to do, the news will not make iOS users happy. If Google compels them to convert photos to JPEG, it will waste its own storage and frustrate those who have gotten used to seeing their images in their original states when it reduces the quality. But if this is the way Google wants to follow, Android and iOS users will be somewhat equal, at least in this respect.

In a separate event, Google, when launching the brand new Pixel 4 and 4 Xl, announced that users of these two handsets would not have free storage of original quality for their photos as with the phones’ predecessors, which has stripped away one of the most welcomed benefits of owning a Pixel phone.