2026-09-20

Signal let Android record past 60 seconds in September 2026 — the real ceiling was always 200MB (per Signal’s own commit history)

The video message that actually fails to send in Signal is rarely the one you just recorded to say something quick — it's the one you're forwarding: a clip already sitting in your camera roll, a screen recording, footage a friend sent you first. Signal spent much of 2026 changing how long a video can run before that failure happens. The number worth knowing isn't a duration at all — it's a byte count, and it hasn't moved as much as the headlines about longer recordings suggest.

What actually changed, in Signal's own commit history

The change itself is public and verifiable straight from Signal's own source code. Commit 607115b in the signalapp/Signal-Android repository is titled, in Signal's own words, "Allow recording in-app videos encrypted to disk." AboutSignal — a site that tracks Signal's app changes and states plainly elsewhere on its own pages that it "is not an official website of Signal Messenger," a distinction worth keeping in mind for everything attributed to it below — reported on September 9, 2026 that this shipped in Signal for Android version 8.26 and that it's what let Signal remove a hard "60-second cap" on in-app video recording: previously, a recording had to be transcoded entirely in memory to avoid ever writing unencrypted video to disk, which is what forced the time limit in the first place; writing to disk in encrypted form removed that constraint. Testing the result, the same outlet found "it was 5 minutes on an Android phone, while on an iPhone we were able to record for more than 15 minutes" — a wide, and telling, gap between two phones running the same app.

The limit was never about time — it's about bytes

That gap is the giveaway. If Signal had simply swapped a 60-second cap for a 5-minute one, both platforms would land on the same number. They don't, and the same AboutSignal report explains why: on iPhone, there never was a separate time-based cap to remove — "recordings on iOS were limited to 100 MB in size" already, before any of this changed. iOS was size-gated the whole time; Android was the one with an artificial clock bolted on top. What actually moved, per AboutSignal's July 31, 2026 report, is the ceiling itself — "the maximum attachment size has been doubled from 100 MB to 200 MB," a server-side change Signal didn't need an app update to ship. Put the two reports together and the sequence reads cleanly: the size ceiling doubled first; then Android's separate, older time-based lock — the one thing standing between Android and the same size-governed behavior iOS already had — got removed. Both platforms now run out of room at the same 200MB wall. Neither report links to an official Signal blog post confirming these specific numbers, so treat "200MB" as AboutSignal's own well-sourced reporting on a Signal server change, not a quotation from Signal itself.

Why a 5-minute phone and a 15-minute phone can share one ceiling

Do the arithmetic on AboutSignal's own hands-on numbers and something else falls out. A 200MB budget spent over roughly 5 minutes on Android works out to about 40MB per minute; the same 200MB spent over more than 15 minutes on iPhone works out to under 13MB per minute. Neither Signal nor AboutSignal states an actual recording bitrate anywhere — this is this post's own rough division, not a published number — but it's a useful sanity check against a real official one: Apple's own support page on compressing a video on iPhone puts a default iPhone Camera recording at "1080p (default iPhone camera and iMovie export settings): 70–105 MB" per minute. Signal's in-app recorder landing at roughly a third of that, or less, on the same hardware isn't a contradiction — video chat and messaging apps routinely record at lower bitrates than a phone's native Camera app — but it does mean the longer recording times in AboutSignal's test almost certainly come from Signal's own camera compressing harder while it records, stopping once the running estimate nears 200MB, not from some new tolerance for larger files.

Where this actually bites: not what you record, what you already have

That compression only applies to video captured through Signal's own in-app camera. The far more common case — attaching a video that already exists, from a camera roll, a screen recorder, or something forwarded to you — never passes through that size-aware stopping logic at all. It arrives at whatever bitrate its original source used, and per Apple's own numbers above, that's 70–105MB a minute for an iPhone's default 1080p setting. At that rate, under three minutes of untouched, default-quality footage is enough to meet or exceed the new 200MB ceiling — and under the old 100MB one, the same math meant well under a minute and a half. Signal recording for longer than it used to solves nothing for a file that was never recorded inside Signal in the first place.

What actually gets you under 200MB

Apple's own guidance on that same support page, for exactly this situation, is to "trim the video to make it shorter" — which is NearVid's Trim tool, done on-device: a lossless stream copy, no re-encode, so cutting a long clip down to the part worth sending shrinks the file by roughly the same fraction as the runtime cut. If the trimmed result is still over 200MB, NearVid's Convert to WebM — or Convert to MP4, where the browser's own WebCodecs H.264 encoding is detected as available — re-encodes at a High/Medium/Low quality preset (2Mbps/1Mbps/500kbps for WebM, 4Mbps/2Mbps/800kbps for MP4, per NearVid's own bitrate table) and shows an "≈" expected file size next to that preset before you commit to the export. That's the difference between guessing whether a file will clear Signal's wall and seeing an estimate first — and doing both steps without the video ever leaving your device to get there.

What this doesn't fix

NearVid doesn't touch Signal itself — it only prepares a file before you open the app and attach it yourself, and it has no way to detect which device is on the other end of the conversation. If compatibility with an unknown recipient's phone matters more than file size, Convert to MP4 (where available) is the safer target than WebM — iOS has no built-in decoder for WebM outside a browser that ships its own, a general platform limitation this site has covered separately, not something specific to how Signal's app handles attachments. And the "Signal compresses harder than the iPhone default camera" conclusion above is this post's own division of AboutSignal's reported minutes into its reported megabytes, not a number either Signal or AboutSignal has published directly — a reasonable inference from public figures, not a measurement.

The honest summary

Signal's own public commit history confirms Android's old 60-second in-app recording cap is gone as of version 8.26, and AboutSignal's reporting — clearly labeled by AboutSignal itself as unofficial — ties that change to a July 2026 server-side move that doubled Signal's attachment ceiling from 100MB to 200MB, a number iPhone recordings were already governed by before Android caught up. The headline is a longer recording window; the number that actually decides whether any given video, new or old, makes it through is still measured in megabytes, not minutes. Trim to the part worth keeping, then convert at a preset that shows its expected size before you commit — entirely on your own device, which fits a messenger built around keeping your messages off someone else's server in the first place.