Apple's Revenge: iMessage Might Eat Your Texts If You Switch To Android 415
redletterdave (2493036) writes "When my best friend upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a Galaxy S4, I texted her hello. Unfortunately, she didn't get that text, nor any of the five I sent in the following three days. My iPhone didn't realize she was now an Android user and sent all my texts via iMessage. It wasn't until she called me about going to brunch that I realized she wasn't getting my text messages. What I thought was just a minor bug is actually a much larger problem. One that, apparently, Apple has no idea how to fix. Apple said the company is aware of the situation, but it's not sure how to solve it. One Apple support person said: 'This is a problem a lot of people are facing. The engineering team is working on it but is apparently clueless as to how to fix it. There are no reliable solutions right now — for some people the standard fixes work immediately; many others are in my boat.'"
Re:IIRC (Score:5, Interesting)
It does that if and only if there are no other iMessage-enabled devices that can read it. One of the things that I enjoy about the feature is that I can use Messages on my laptop if I'm working, and my phone doesn't go bananas either reporting that it got texts or expecting me to deal with a sea of notifications - they're there in the history, but even if my phone is turned off or not on a network (happens a lot on planes that charge per-device for wifi) I can text to/from my laptop and nobody knows any different.
Figuring out when someone's phone is gone "for good" is a remarkably easy social problem but a very difficult technical one. Making it even easier than it is today for someone to Apple when their phone is gone is the solution, not some terribly complicated heuristics. Of course, that still requires someone to do something, which they'll complain about - but such is life.
Re:"No reliable solution" (Score:4, Interesting)
What would be a better solution is Apple making it cross platform. This way, no matter what platform one is on, iMessages go through. This would establish iMessage as a standard, and that would be better for Apple on the long term, than only allowing their devices to use it.
Re:"No reliable solution" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Auto switches (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently Apple knows less about their own products than I do as an Apple developer. You can't trust a random support employee to know how iMessage works, it's a complicated system.
It's very simple. If you send an SMS to a number registered as being an iPhone, it will be encrypted for that phone and sent over the internet. If the phone does not decrypt the message and send an acknowledgment within a few minutes, it will be sent as an SMS instead. Repeated delivery failures (2 or 3?) will automatically disable iMessage.
According to the article, the iMessage is sent and status immediately changes to "delivered". That means he has at least one device registered to receive iMessages at that phone number and it is turned on and received the message. His claim to have logged out of iMessage on all his devices is bullshit. He forgot one.
Re:iOS: Deactivating iMessage (Score:2, Interesting)
So I have to borrow someone's Apple device and make a change because Apple is unwilling/unable to offer... say a web based portal to manage this? Or simply not deliver messages to no longer existing devices?
Wow... I'm rather glad I've never owned an iPhone, I'd hate to live in that sort of world of forced buy in that exists even after you leave it.
Re:Auto switches (Score:2, Interesting)
Apparently Apple knows less about their own products than I do as an Apple developer.
Wrong. Your understanding of iMessage is incorrect, see below.
If the phone does not decrypt the message and send an acknowledgment within a few minutes, it will be sent as an SMS instead.
Incorrect. Fallback to SMS works in the case where the message fails to send not if it fails to receive which is why it will not fall back to SMS if the receiver's phone/ipad/laptop is simply switched off.
According to the article, the iMessage is sent and status immediately changes to "delivered". That means he has at least one device registered to receive iMessages at that phone number and it is turned on and received the message.
Incorrect again. It means that it has been delivered to the email account associated with the iMessage account.
His claim to have logged out of iMessage on all his devices is bullshit. He forgot one.
Incorrect yet again. Even if he turns of iMessage the receiver needs to have done the same thing or else his messages to her will be delivered to the email account associated with her iMessage account.
Re:Fix according to Apple is (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple tech support has plenty of similar pages on apple's own web page. The whole article is FUD, and it's FUD that I've seen at least 3 times before on slashdot.