Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility 136
tlhIngan writes When moving from an iPhone to something else, if you were an avid user of iMessage, you may find your messages missing, especially from iOS-using friends. Indeed, it has been such a problem that there are even lawsuits about it. While Apple has maintained that users can always switch off iMessage, that only works if you still have your iOS device. Unless one also has other iOS devices or a Mac, they may not even realize their friends have been sending messages that are queued up on Apple's services via iMessage. Well, that problem has been resolved with Apple creating a deregistration utility to remove your phone number from the iMessage servers so friends will no longer send you texts via iMessage that you can no longer receive. It's a two-step process involving proof of number ownership (via regular SMS) before deregistration takes place.
Call me (Score:1)
Call me when they allow cross-system forwarding like another phone number or Hangouts.
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iMessage doesn't have to use PSTN. It works fine for people who don't have a number at all so it can't forward to a number.
Overdue (Score:2)
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Re:Overdue (Score:5, Funny)
In Apple's defense, it took them 54 days to decide the radius for the corners of the patch.
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February 14, 2012 to April 3, 2012 - is 18 days.
And it's interesting that you had to go back 2.5 years for your mistaken example.
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Today I learned that a month is 9 days.
You learn something new every day!
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While I'm still on iOS myself, this was a long overdue issue. It's incredibly frustrating to have to switch on/off imessage to send messages to people who have moved over to android. iMessage was/is a great idea, but it took a bit too long for this bug fix to be resolved.
I send SMS messages to Android users all the time from iMessage. What are you talking about? Are you talking about only from OS X, or iOS, too?
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The issue is when it sends a message to a person who was formerly iOS, but has since moved to android.
Yeah, I figured out that was the real issue later. You're right, that would be a hassle. Good that Apple (finally) fixed it, though I think all the hater bullshit is entirely unwarranted. It was just a thing that didn't come up in design meetings until after the "real world" started providing more use-case data.
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It isn't really a bug. It is a correction for users not thinking, not reading and not paying attention. The system was doing what they told it to do.
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That's correct. Delivered and Read are different statuses. Which is ironic given you are complaining about the rapid fanboys yet still even today haven't bothered to read the instructions they were telling you to read.
Try explaining that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Try explaining that... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Occam's razor applies here. You can either read it as "EVIL APPLE, take over SMS to screw people OVER!!!!!" or you can read it as "Apple tried to make imessage a seamless extension on SMS, and got them a little too intermixed". I kind of see it more as the latter. Witness this with the issue with SMS/google account intermixing in Google Hangouts.
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Or you could say, "Apple has a grossly oversized ego and thinks the world centers around them."
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Not sure how "announcement of website to allow people to walk away" leads into refusal. Oh, it must be seamless? Are you an engineer? Do you realize the complexity of decoupling two things? If you mix salt and sugar into a bowl, are you then evil when you say you can't divide them?
Please explain how iPhone corporate is supposed to know when you drop a SIM into another phone? Or are you supposed to call Apple if you move SIMs now? Which will lead to people complaining about how Apple is being a speedbump in
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It's not even simply when you move away. Case in point; My wife and eldest daughter are currently in Oz. With Three Mobile, they get free calls and SMS as though they were in the UK. My youngest daughter is still in the UK. My choices at the moment;
1) Turn off iMessage on my iPhone so that I can communicate with wife and daughter in Oz, but not be able to communicate with youngest daughter or anyone else using an iPhone in the UK.
2) Leave iMessage on and vice-versa.
3) Constantly switch between the two in th
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SMS used to be quite limited in the USA, but most providers started making "Unlimited" SMS either the standard or a very cheap price.
I still still send / receive SMS. It's the one universal method to reach someone (other than calling). Meanwhile some of my friends use iMessage, some Hangouts, some WhatsApp, some email, etc. Instead of dealing with a bunch of different apps I just use iMessage app for SMS and iMessage.
But when it comes to sending pics or whatever, I just use Email.
SMS to land line (Score:2)
I still still send / receive SMS. It's the one universal method to reach someone (other than calling).
Universal among cell phone users that is. How many land line providers render SMS using text to speech?
Instead of dealing with a bunch of different apps I just use iMessage app for SMS and iMessage.
So what do you use to talk to people who use not-Mac PCs or Android tablets?
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Do people who use non-mac PCs and Android tablets not have cell phones too?
Some do. But people who use a land line as a primary phone and a cell phone only for urgent calls (roadside assistance, finding someone in a large mall, letting an apartment dweller know to unlock the door and let him in, etc.) tend to choose a cheap pay-as-you-go plan because it's cheaper than an unlimited plan. Pay-as-you-go subscribers in the United States have to pay for each text message sent or received. And with QWERTY phones becoming hard to find, T9 isn't exactly the most convenient input method fo
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Ehy don't you read what you quote? He stated clearly: SMS.
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What has this 'I spell it out' to do with the topic?
And yes you can SMS to a land line phone or to a PC. In what yahoo part of the world do you live that you can't?
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To give our parent a point. Did not think about that before I saw your post. Perhaps SMS to land lines are limited to ISDN, as I have ISDN myself.
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Universal among cell phone users that is. How many land line providers render SMS using text to speech?
So what do you use to talk to people who use not-Mac PCs or Android tablets?
My Android friends all use their GoogleVoice numbers for everything, so an SMS to a GoogleVoice number pings them everywhere: tablet, smartphone, some on their PC via Voice->Email alerts.
All my other friends a cellphone on them 24/7. So an SMS reaches them right away. Many of them aren't near PC's that often so the phone is actually the best way to reach them.
I email some, if the content is heavy enough (pics, long lext, etc.) and isn't time sensitive.
It must depend on the country (Score:2)
All my other friends a cellphone on them 24/7. So an SMS reaches them right away.
Which country? In my country, pay-as-you-go cellular subscribers have to pay to receive each text message, so costing them money by hitting them with 5 texts in a row might not seem so friendly.
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Here in the US, providers are finally relenting and having their subscription plans include unlimited SMS for either free or a small fee.
All of my friends are on subscription plans with unlimited SMS. So that affects my decision.
I *used* to have, back in the day, a pay-as-you-go so I wouldn't send SMS a lot to those people. I know how annoying that is.
Re:Try explaining that... (Score:5, Interesting)
SMS used to be quite limited in the USA, but most providers started making "Unlimited" SMS either the standard or a very cheap price.
Which they did after iMessage and other alternative messaging services came out, of course. I'm grateful to Apple for forcing their hand.
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It's the one universal method to reach someone (other than calling).
What happened to email? Way more universal as you don't need to write it on your phone. And you don't even need a cell phone.
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Obviously I use email when it's lengthy and not time critical. And I also use them when sending pics or files or whatever. And if it's something personal or not requiring specific text/instructions/addresses/etc. then talking is idea.
But
- Only *some* of the people I know have a SmartPhone setup with email push/fetch
- Only *some* of the people I know are near a computer during the day enough for it to matter.
So, an email might go days without being read by some.
Everyone I know has a mobile on them. So if
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There was 145 billion of them sent last year, so the answer is probably "lots of people".
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Many places in semi-rural USA don't have reliable 3G, so SMS is a good fallback.
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It's all about the Phone Number ID (Score:2)
The real issue is that you can't opt out of automatically having your phone number become and account/id in iMessage.
I want to use iMessage on my iPhone, but only with regular iCloud accounts, not with the phone number being used to create an account.
Unfortunately, the iOS team doesn't give the user that option.
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You can, just go into the imessage settings. In fact you are specifically asked if you want to add your phone number to imessage when you set up your phone.
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You can, just go into the imessage settings. In fact you are specifically asked if you want to add your phone number to imessage when you set up your phone.
Incorrect.
Your phone number is used to create an ID immediately when you turn on iMessage. You have no choice in the matter.
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The real issue is that you can't opt out of automatically having your phone number become and account/id in iMessage.
I want to use iMessage on my iPhone, but only with regular iCloud accounts, not with the phone number being used to create an account.
Unfortunately, the iOS team doesn't give the user that option.
The option is given when you set up a device for iMessage. It explicitly asks how you want to be contacted. By number, by email(s)/AppleIDs, or all of the above
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Plus you can always change it under "Send & Receive" in Message's settings is the Preferences app.
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Plus you can always change it under "Send & Receive" in Message's settings is the Preferences app.
Incorrect.
You can change OTHER ids but the phone number id is greyed out and you can't deselect it.
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The option is given when you set up a device for iMessage. It explicitly asks how you want to be contacted. By number, by email(s)/AppleIDs, or all of the above
It does not. It only asks if you want to use OTHER ids that you have set up. Your phone number becoming an id isn't optional.
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What does that even mean? What function does that setup serve? I can't even see the use case here. The phone number being associated allows the sender to fallback to SMS if they are trying to message you and they can't get data. It is a feature.
Yes. Apple doesn't allow all possible combinations that are conceivable.
iMessage isn't bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually like the idea behind iMessage: If you have internet access, sending a message via internet is potentially much cheaper than via SMS (unless you have an unlimited SMS plan). Even Apple's implementation of iMessage isn't too bad.
The problem is that it's lock-in to Apple devices, of course. If Apple could get their head out of the sand and create a unified protocol with Google and whoever is left in the smartphone OS field (BlackBerry?, Mozilla?), it would be fantastic. Especially if the protocol was expanded a bit. Imagine being able to share files like via dropbox, but seemlessly through an SMS app?
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and you just invented WhatsApp!
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And it's not the default configuration for all devices!
If we could force users to use a single program instead of the default ones, Internet Explorer would have died a decade ago.
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It did start to happen. Firefox gained share. Internet Explorer's share has been going up as it got better. But certainly there was a point during the end of the IE6 / IE7 era when share was dropping rapidly and people did switch.
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Except WhatsApp sucks rocks
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If Apple could get their head out of the sand and create a unified protocol with Google and whoever is left in the smartphone OS field (BlackBerry?, Mozilla?), it would be fantastic.
I don't know about Blackberry or Mozilla, but Google supports XMPP messaging with at least several different messaging apps (and Linux/OSX/Windows programs). But even Google has some features that only work with its messaging app.
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Uh, do you not read slashdot?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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I know that Chat/Hangouts isn't really XMPP anymore, but it does still support XMPP connections at least for regular messages.
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GoogleTalk is deprecated and its XMPP federation is broken. Hangouts does not support XMPP, the protocol is proprietary. This is the reason I use neither, I stopped using GT when federation stopped working and I refuse to use Hangouts unless I can use my own client. I never stopped using IRC and it is the only IM service I use today.
I receive all my hangouts messages in pidgin using XMPP, so somehow it works.
(I'm not saying they have it all working correctly. I've never completely understood the mess that is voice/hangouts/google talk/etc. But I do know that when I get a hangouts message, it appears both on my phone and in pidgin via XMPP)
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Apple Lock-In ... but I repeat myself.
My Choice is to go to the device agnostic Google, using Google Voice and Hangouts to do everything (and more) than any iDevice/iMessage can do. SMS from any computer with a browser. Apps for both iOS and Android, PC and Mac.
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Google Voice is US only, and Google Hangouts is every bit as proprietary as iMessage.
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Can I use iMessage if I don't have anything Apple? That is proprietary.
Hangouts is available via web service, not proprietary. Closed network, possibly (except SMS works too, regardless of having GV or not)
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No, that's not the definition of proprietary. Being a "closed network" and indeed a closed protocol does indeed make it proprietary.
And it's interesting that you are giving bonus points for Google leveraging SMS when Apple does too.
Basically, you are starting from the position - Google right, Apple wrong - then making up your own definitions and rules to support that conclusion. That's intellectually corrupt.
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You think you're not being mined? LOL funny.
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If you have internet access, sending a message via internet is potentially much cheaper than via SMS (unless you have an unlimited SMS plan).
I'm not sure what plans are like in the USA, but here in Australia and from what I've seen from family in Europe people watch their data caps and couldn't care less about their SMS plans. The included value on SMSes even for the lowest tier plans is in the order of several hundred messages a day and you need to be a teenage girl in her first love to start worrying about hitting SMS allowances.
Great! Now how about... (Score:1)
A utility for getting all my photos out of iPhoto, and all my data out of Time Machine?
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AFAIK Time Machine uses local storage. Then again I don't use iCloud, so maybe that's an option that I don't know about.
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A utility for getting all my photos out of iPhoto, and all my data out of Time Machine?
You mean something that reads the HFS+ filesystem?
Time Machine backups are copies of your files. If you have software that can read your original files then that very same software can also open the copy of the file that Time Machine made. You do not need Time Machine's interface to read these files.
If you use Time Machine on a network drive then there's an additional step of mounting the disk image it creates, which is left as an exercise to the reader.
No one seems to see the real privacy issue (Score:1)
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This was what I was thinking too. Apple doesn't appear to have considered the recycling of phone numbers at all, either when they first did the redirection or when they created the deregistration process. What their system should do is monitor the iPhone and, if it hasn't connected to the network in the last 30 days using the phone number in question, automatically deregister the device from iMessage and revert to vanilla SMS for it. Or they should at least allow controlling this all through the Apple accou
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The issue isn't recycling of numbers or devices, but rather user education about remembering to tell Apple to deactivate the service before moving. It's just like changing your physical address--you have to put a little thought into it ahead of time to make sure it goes smoothly.
And this is what I meant when I said that dealing with the abnormal cases and error conditions is what separates the professionals from the amateurs. For the change-of-address process, for instance, it's prepared to handle the cas
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First off Apple doesn't deliver via. SMS. The fallover to SMS happens on the phone. If you want your messages you pick them up with your Mac.
Second, Apple has websites to change settings and tech support for people to call if they screw up. So they do handle the edge cases.
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No, they don't. For one thing, the problem here is that Apple's system has registered the recipient's phone as handling messages through iMessage rather than SMS, and tells the sender's phone to use iMessage. And then when the recipient's phone isn't able to receive messages via iMessage, Apple's system never tells the sender that the messages can't be delivered so the sender doesn't know to do anything. The recipient can't pick up "their" messages on their Mac because they may not own a Mac, and they no lo
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They aren't doing damage control they are releasing a utility. There hasn't been any damage to Apple. There have been a bunch of Android users screaming about Apple hijacking SMS and not understanding how iMessage works.
Second, the sender incidentally does know to do something because his messages are going to be marked as queued but not delivered to any device. So the sender will be notified of a delivery failure. They will make their own choice what to do when messages are obviously getting through t
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That person still had the number registered and likely had a mac.
So number X is tied to account Y. Account Y can still be delivered via. a mac or iPad or ... So from Apple's perspective everything is good. That person didn't deregister their number with Apple.
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Well Apple would love it if the carriers would just tell them when a number gets assigned to a new phone. But Apple doesn't know. It isn't that the carriers have to do it, or Apple doesn't care, but that the carriers don't want to incorporate Apple into their workflow.
In the end it is a computer, garbage-in garbage-out. Someone has to take responsibility to maintain correct account informaiton If users don't care to do it, then obviously they don't care about messages going to the wrong people or not ge
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Well its the other guy's fault for not deregistering his number. In your friend's case he needs to let Apple know. What I'm saying is it isn't Apple's fault they have no way of knowing the change took place.
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Just had to do this... (Score:1)
Well, it's the heretics' fault (Score:2)
I mean, getting removed from iMessage is not really something that Apple planned.
Even if you deregister from iMessage, it might take 45(!!!) days till your phone number gets removed from all databases.
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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Not everyone has an "unlimited texts" contract. And when you compare the few dozen bytes required for a simple text message vs your data quota, it might as well be unlimited even with a monthly cap as low as 100MB.
Also, iMessage also works on devices that are not a phone. This allows you to send a message from a Mac to another person who is on the road with his iPhone. Who the fuck needs SMS in 2014?
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There's better options than SMS on other devices.
What we need is for Apple, Google, Microsoft and others to just sit down and agree to a single messaging service. We have a single standard for email, for the Web, for images (JPEG, PNG, GIF), why is messaging still messed-up after all those years?
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Well, why was there ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, YIM, etc? Why did they all make incompatible messaging protocols?
Because no one bothered to try to standardize something. Sure someone made XMPP, but damn if Google didn't drop support for it as well and make their own.
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the issue is that apple has interest in making it encrypted to meet customer expectations. imessages are so encrypted apple can't read them at all in transit. goog would hate this, and needs them to be sent in plaintext so they can advertise against them. this is why there will never be a cross compatible standard.
next best thing tho. unlike whats app or similar, imessage is optional and transparent to the user. if i send a text to an iphone user, it goes through imessage, and if i send it to a droid person
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Because we have a email standard we still have spam two decades after it started becoming a problem. Thank you I'll take no standard and faster improvement. Email has been a disaster of a model.
As for the web the proprietary layer is the plugins and how stuff renders on different browsers. And yes that's still broken.
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Well if email had not been a broad standard all sorts of systems could have been put in place to control spam. Skype for example doesn't have a serious spam problem as it is harder to fake accounts and you can refuse messages from anyone who you don't first invite. Something that's not possible with email.
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Ok, I want to know when person X (any person using a mobile phone) is reachable, so I can voice call him.
Some fascinating observation, just because you have GSM service, that does not mean you have data service (especially when one is at the edge of network coverage, or e.g. while roaming).
With SMS, you send a nice message with "delivery report" enabled, and the next time that teenager with behaviour problems is reachable, your phone will notice you via the delivery report. Next step, call said teenager (th
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If you are going to submit stories you need to get an account. You wrote things like "Larry page", proof read. You also should have used an article with more editorial stance and content. There isn't enough there to get a conversation going.
So you could have listed the who Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Orange, Telenor and TeliaSonera,Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Liberty. I was surprised to see Vodafone, Orange and Alcatel-Lucent on the list. They all have their own closed communications platfor
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IRC, jabber [wikipedia.org] and xabber. [xabber.org] Good IM clients with integrated support for a bunch of protocols and servers exist for every device I've ever heard of (with the possible exception of iPhones due to Apple's 'we hate you' policy towards users)
Nice Try, Hater.
Not only is Cisco Jabber [apple.com] available for iOS, and according to Xabber's Blog [xabber.com], Xabber is currently in development for iOS; but In about 2 seconds of Googling, I found FOUR iOS IRC Clients:
Palaver [apple.com]
Colloquy [apple.com]
LimeChat [apple.com]
Turbo IRC [apple.com]
There may (probably are) more; but those are sufficient to put your little rant to rest...
Metered text and unmetered data (Score:2)
Texting is unlimited. Data is not.
Even if this is true of the plan to which you subscribe, it may not be true of plans to which other people subscribe. Consider someone with a PC at home and a $7/mo pay as you go flip phone. In this case, data is unmetered (or damn close to it at 300 GB/mo) and texts are 20 cents each: 10 to send and 10 to receive.
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Nobody calls iMessage explicitly. Apple users send texts using the regular texting app. It an Apple device is detected at both ends, the app automatically send the text over the Internet using iMessage; if it detects an infidel device at the other end, it falls back to SMS. The sender knows which choice was made by seeing the sent message in a blue or green bubble, respectively. The advantage to the user is that iMessage has no 140-character length limit, included pictures, etc. are faster, and the messages
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Texting is unlimited if you have it included in your phone plan. Many providers will otherwise double-dip on each SMS (charge both the sender and receiver)
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iMessage integrates with you Mac so you can use it as a computer messaging client that also works well from your phone.