In 2019, smartphone brands have made huge jumps in camera quality, especially when it comes to zoom and low-light. On the other hand, video quality hasn’t been given the same amount of attention. That could change in 2020 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865’s improved ISP. Yet, even as Android smartphones are shipping with larger internal storage capacities, have faster modems, and are now supporting 5G networks, an old limitation prevents most of these phones from saving video files that are larger than 4GB in size. However, that could change in Android 11, the next major version of Android that’s set to release in 2020.
The reason the limit existed in the first place is far more interesting than its removal – it’s a classic case of “[insert amount] should be enough for everyone” that’s now been annoying people who record a lot of video on Android for years.
Could be something to do with memory cards and their FAT32 filesystem limitations, one of which is a maximum file size of 4 GB. Even if the internal storage could handle larger files, users could have found it confusing why they cannot move a video file from the internal storage to an SD card or external hard drive.
Nowadays I believe exFAT is the FS of choice for larger memory cards so hitting this old limitation will be less common.
That was my thought too. Note that even if a device doesn’t have a physical SD card, Android emulates an SD card out of internal storage which is what applications use for unstructured storage. That emulated SD card honors FAT semantics to prevent applications from depending on richer storage support that wouldn’t be present on devices with physical SD cards. It looks like that emulation wasn’t ever capping file size, although arguably it should have.