Apple's Messages Offers Free Texting With a Side of iPhone Lock-In

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."

Not Always

[rainwater]

I switched to Android and disabled iMessage before switching. Even though I did that, iMessage wasn't disabled and I wasn't able to receive messages for days from iPhone users. It is not always a user error.

Re: Turn off iMessages ?

[WebCowboy]

We purged our household of iphones last year and went through this little "eff you" crapple experince. Nobody tells you that apple hijacks your sms permanently by default and it must be manually taken back if you switch platforms.

After 3 days of missing texts the wife turned on her ipad to watch some netflix and saw all these texts. After going on a treasure hunt we figured out how to free iphone-source texts from the imessage prison via the apple website as the old iphone was gone.

Apple makes this harder to find than it should be but it isn't too hard to do. You don't have to tell all your friends who still have iphones to mess with their settings but you may have to wait a day or two for the de-registration to propigate to all your friends iphones--the imessage system seems to work like DNS.