Apple's Messages Offers Free Texting With a Side of iPhone Lock-In 179
itwbennett writes "Who doesn't love free text messages? People who try to transition from an iPhone to any other phone, that's who. Apple's Messages app actively moves conversations away from paid text messages to free Messages. Very convenient until you want to leave your iPhone and switch back to plain old text messages because suddenly you'll be unable to receive text messages from your iPhone-toting friends. There's an obscure workaround, and Samsung, which has a vested interest in the matter, has a lengthy guide to removing your iPhone as a registered receiver of Messages . But the experience is just annoying enough that it might be the kind of thing that would keep someone from making a switch — and that's when it starts to feel like deliberate lock-in, and not so much like something Apple overlooked."
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Learned the hard way (Score:5, Insightful)
on the iphone, you just sign out of imessage. go to settings, messages, send and recieve. tap on your apple id and tap sign out. Then apple will know to send any texts to your number as SMS not imessage. although it shouldn't be a big dealio because when your friends send texts the imessage should fall back to a SMS when the imessage fails.
I guess it's a step when switching, but it's hardly a lock-in.
Re:Learned the hard way (Score:2, Insightful)
Lets correct a few misunderstandings there newbie
Apple was one of the movers and shakers for USB adoption. They were the first top tier manufacturer ( HP/Dell/Sony/etc ) to include USB only systems ( by that I mean no backward compatibility ) and were criticized for it at the time.
Apple didn't support HDMI on their computers ( but do on mac mini and apple TV even today) , but there was little purpose before then to even consider it. It is electronically identical to DVI, which in the late 90's early 2000's they were already supporting and HDMI didn't have the feature of backward compatibility of VGA. No monitors supported it back then anyway and hdmi TV's were prohibitively expensive. Also, this is not a unified or open standard. In recent years Apple has backed Display port, which is open and completely *royalty free* and backed by VESA.
Apple's Bonjour is mDNS which apple began work on in 1998 ( proposed in 1997 by someone who went on to be an Apple employee ). Apple participated in submitting drafts for RFC's for this in the early 2000's and to separate RFCs were ratified in 2013. ( rfc6762 and rfc6763 ) OPEN standards.
There is extraordinary precedent of Apple being open the quicktime server code has a BSD license. The Webkit engine which is basically in EVERYTHING is BSD licensed. Apple contributes code directly to FreeBSD on many occasions. Apple was instrumental in the adoption and maturity of LLVM.
So lets not be so flippant, shall we?
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Just disassociate your number from iMessages. It's not hard. The article in the summary mentions half a dozen ways to do it, only one of which requires your iPhone. What do you want Apple to do, hire some psychics so they know when you switch phones?
Re:WTF (Score:1, Insightful)
Can I point out that what you're saying is "just do something that though isn't difficult, should still be unnecessary and doesn't behave like one would expect". Good software design dictates that yes, you save the user money by using the free messenger, but if it fails, pop up a notification asking if they want to send it anyway with a paid for option. Failing silently in this way and requiring you to go to a hidden option (hidden option is any option not on the main user screen), is just piss poor design. But then again, Apple has often failed the "good design" test. For example, the ipod nano that you had to enter apples own version of Morse code to skip a track.
Re:WTF (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny.
The page title is "Verizon Tabs: How do I turn off iMessage on my old iPhone before I switch to my new Samsung device?"
So, when someone switches away from an iPhone, they should just know that before they switch, they should check around and make sure they do it right, like check that people with an iPhone can still send them SMS messages once they get their new phone. I can picture it now, your mom is switching away from her iPhone and say asks"Do I have to do anything to make sure people with an iPhone can still send me messages?" Seems like a common sense to ask huh?
These are people that switched phones probably 10 times over the last 20 years and never had to make sure they logged onto a web site or did some some combination of settings on their old phone first to make sure people could still send them messages. I guess we should all be psychics and just know we have to check iMessage settings before we switch. What else should people check now that you have perfect hind-sight vision of this issue.
Re: WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
That is what confuses people. An iphone user sends a text to a phone number so they expect it to go to a phone number but that is not what happens by default.
The default behaviour once your phone number is hijacked by imessage is for the iphone to look up your phone number to find the apple account it is attached to then route the message to ANY device associated with that account.
As a result, if the recipient has any device associated with their apple account and they do not remove their phone number from their apple account imessage will NOT fall back to sms...it will consider the message sent!
Some examples of the confusion of crapple iMESSage default behaviour for the poor ex iphone users I know:
* wife replaced iphone with a Note 3. 3 days later she turned on her ipad and several hijacked texts sent to her phone number showed up there...on her wifi only device
* my niece upgraded from ipgone 3gs to a galaxy and gave the old deactivated/no-sim iphone to her son as a toy after wiping it. For the next few days her son was getting many of the texts that were supposed to go to her phone number
* A coworker received a blackberry z10 to replace an iphone and he started getting texts on his macbook air.
This is maddening insane default behaviour. Apple is supposed to be intuitive and this is the opposite. No sane person would expect to have a text sent to a phone number to get sent to some other random device that has no phone connection when they switch phones but that is what happens. Imessage is not as smart, simple or as sensible as you suggest it is.
Re: WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because Apple hides these feature descriptions in out of sight places called public websites. I'm sorry if you didn't rtfm. Why is that a problem for anyone but those stupid enough to buy and use a device without reading or knowing how it works?
http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/... [apple.com]
http://www.apple.com/ios/messa... [apple.com]
I love how stupid people get mad at others when they do something stupid.
Re: WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything you described is NOT default behavior. The default behavior is for iMessage not to be on. If you have an iPhone and don't turn on iMessage then texting works just as normal.
To be clear, you have to actively assign your phone number to iMessage, and then assign email addresses and devices to that account.
The whole point of iMessage is to disassociate your phone service as the controller of your SMS and have the control be given to iMessage. This is in part so that you CAN send and receive texts on things like your MacBook over WiFi with no cell connectivity and all transparently.
Sure, I can see how it may be confusing for people who stick their heads in the sand and wave their hands in the air when it comes to reading instructions, but changing the way the system works to accommodate the ignorant isn't the answer.
That's like blaming Google hosted email for hijacking a domain's email.
Why did your wife's iPad get the text message? Because she configured it to do just that. Same goes for your coworker's MacBook Air. As far as your niece goes, the phrase "after she wiped it" is false.
This comes from someone traveling in another country right now who just had to send several iMessages from my MacBook Air that would've cost $$$ in international texting had Apple not set things up the way they did.