Android flagship phones have little or nothing to envy about iPhones. But there is a drawback that has persisted for years: video quality on social media apps often pales in comparison to the iPhone. This issue has been present even with top-tier hardware. However, a new partnership between OPPO and Meta aims to finally fix the soft or muddy video quality footage from social media apps’ cameras—like Instagram—on Android, starting with the Find X9 Ultra (Review).

Resolution isn’t everything

When we talk about video quality, we often focus on resolution—like 1080p or 4K. But as tech insider Ice Universe recently pointed out, bitrate is arguably more important for social media. While resolution determines the number of pixels, bitrate determines how much detail those pixels actually hold.

High-resolution footage with a low bitrate often looks blurry during complex scenes. This specifically affects recordings taken directly from the built-in camera in social media apps. To fix this, OPPO and Meta have optimized the video sharing pipeline to ensure that videos retain a much higher bitrate during the upload process.

OPPO Find X9 Ultra fix: big Instagram video quality boost

This optimization means that what you capture on your phone is much closer to what your followers actually see. For users of the OPPO Find X9 Ultra, videos will now look sharper and cleaner, preserving fine details that were previously lost to aggressive compression.

It’s worth noting that Ice Universe’s post specifically mentions the OPPO Find X9 Ultra. So, for now, we can’t confirm whether other models in the X9 series will benefit from this collaboration. Anyway, let’s hope these improvements also reach not only current and future but also older models in the future.

Will other brands follow suit?

This partnership is a significant step. Traditionally, Instagram has been more optimized for Apple‘s limited range of devices. In the past, Samsung has also touted optimizations focused on resolving this specific issue. Now, OPPO is collaborating at a system level with Meta to offer a much better media-sharing experience. Will more brands be on the way in the future? We will have to wait to find out.