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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."
What kind of bullshit story is this? If you move away from your iPhone, guess what, you won't get iMessages. You'll still get text messages because yes, the iPhone falls back to that when an iMessage doesn't send.
I found this out over a year ago when i finally switched. It was dammed annoying too. Took a couple of days to even figure out it was happening "didn't you get my message?"
Thankfully my iDevice was still functional so i could turn it back on, but it would have been even harder if not.
Thanks for nothing, Apple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You can just turn of iMessages and the conversation reverts to plain text messages. It has always worked for me.
"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."
That's not how it works. And the "obscure workaround" linked is simply instructions for how to send an iMessage as a text, like in the cases where iMessage fails (poor reception).
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.
But on any other phone I can still continue to receive texts from everyone. With apple if the the other person doesn't delete the message thread they can't reach you. This has nothing to do with what I can do to fix the issue. Apple's version of free always comes with a hefty price.
Why is imessage opt put instead of opt in if not to create a vendor lock in situation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
There's a support page for that.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
So basically, if you start a messages session on your iphone, with another messages account and then for some unknown reason decide that you're not going to use your iPhone to continue the conversation but switch to a completely different phone that you're also paying for service on for some reason, you can't continue that conversation over messages. Of course, you can just send a text message from your other phone to your friend and keep going but I guess that's too difficult.
If you kept your number, your friend still on Messages will see your text in their Messages conversation and, when replying, will think it got sent to you but in reality it gets sent to your Message account which should be (but isn't) disabled.
As far as I can tell form the shitty summary, anyway.
Hangouts works on any device connected to the internet, phone, PC, whatever. It uses the open XMPP protocol. It's a shame Google left the federation however.
They both believe in vendor lock. When I got my iMac it converted my photos from my camera to some iPhoto library from which it was quite difficult to take it out in simple jog files. For the two years I used iMac my videos and photos were all so locked up I actually lost interest and reduced my shutter bug instincts a lot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Good. Please explain how it does work.
Per this old article:
http://asia.cnet.com/faq-whats...
It seems to work like this.
You go to the messaging app. This is the default messaging app. It does text messages (SMS), and it does iMessages. So far so good.
You enter a number or directly a contact. It checks if that contact is believed to use iMessage by way of the phone number. If it believes the contact uses iMessage, it will send it as an iMessage, otherwise it will send it as a text message.
Still so far so good.
Now that contact stops using iMessage - the example given being that they switch devices, keeping the same number. They didn't "turn iMessage off", because why on Earth does that seem like a logical thing to have to do? Especially if, say, they switched devices because their iPhone died; in which case, they can't turn it off (or can they? Oh yes, they can contact Apple Support; http://support.apple.com/kb/TS... ).
Now you send them a message. The iMessage app is clueless and sends an iMessage because hey, nobody ever told it that the contact is no longer using iMessage. iMessage will eventually come back and say that it failed, and you as the sender either send again or shrug it off, but it might not occur to you to send as a text message instead. If you even can. Yes, if it already failed, you can hold the text and force that to send as text message. But the very next one you send is going to be an iMessage again. Of course, you can disable iMessage on your end, but that disables sending iMessage to all of your contacts. Short of deleting pre-existing iMessages for a given contact, it doesn't seem there's a way to just flip the "this contact uses iMessage" bit.
But here's the rub.. they shouldn't have to explicitly set anything at all.
A. Receive iMessage from contact -> set iMessage bit on contact.
B. Receive text message from contact -> clear iMessage bit on contact if present.
C. Failed iMessage -> re-send. Failed again? -> re-send as text. Delivered? (if supported by the networks) -> clear iMessage bit. Otherwise, see A/B.
D. User enables / disables iMessage explicitly -> set state in central registry (Apple ID is involved, right?).
E. Every once in a while, send as an iMessage anyway if the central registry suggests that the user really should have iMessage because they never turned it off. Worst case: the send ends up with situation C said 'every once in a while', which would be transparent to them. Best case: after a few of those, even the central registry could get a clue and disable the iMessage bit on their end, allowing it to propagate.
Having the onus of 'iMessage bit' state at the sender's side be solely on the end of the recipient is stupid.
I wouldn't say that it is a case of lock-in, though. Just a suboptimal approach. (And yes, I realize there's potential issues with A-E above as well). The bit that makes it peculiar, to say the least, is that this problem has been complained about since at least the end of 2011. Just not by enough people for it to be "an actual story", I guess.
Correct me if any of the above is wrong - I'm certainly not an iPhone user so I've only got the most basic of google search results as my sources.
Many telco plans (possibly even most) no longer charge for texts. They already been squeezed out of the market by social media. These days data is all that matters and that's what telco's primarily charge for.
-Matt
So being a member of Google+ just for signing up for Gmail is vendor lockin too? Thanks for clearing that up.
I recall a similar problem I had when transitioning from blackberry (both my iphone and blackberry are/were my work phone). Was hell trying to figure out how to deal with contacts etc still using bbm ......
The fact is you can use any XMPP client to send messages to those using Google Hangouts / Google Talk. If you want to communicate with iMessage users you need an iProduct and a software written by Apple. So even without the federation, it is much more useful than a proprietary protocol.
I read the summary. The summary sounds like some cheap ass lifehacker story. In true /. tradition, i'm posting after reading the summary without RTFA.
Wife and I have a family plan with separate data and shared minutes. AT&T wants $30/month for the a texting plan. Even at $0.20/text, we don't come close to $30.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
This is the same with Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, BBM, and all the rest. At least I can copy my iPhone's messages to a PC and archive them.
Apple's security documents show just how secure it actually is, with iMessage using public key cryptography. Are we going to also complain that PGP locks you in too now?
Try pulling your data out of most services and importing it. Good luck with that.
My girlfriend switched to a Nexus 4 from an iPhone shortly after the push of iOS 7, and came at me with the old: "This Android is a piece of shit! It won't receive texts!". I went through quite a lot of head-scratching trying to figure this out, as I initially assumed it was a problem with her new provider. After about 20 troubleshooting steps with little help from Apple or the internet, I figured out that only people with iOS 7 devices weren't able to send her texts. The solution: iOS7 leaves SMS off for iOS contacts by default. She had to "unregister" her iPhone and remove her mobile number from their database, letting Apple's iMessage servers know to always default to SMS with her phone number. This, of course, took nearly a week to kick in, in which her boss and co-workers had to frequently step outside to call her when they had a question. To a mobile phone dork it's pretty obnoxious. To someone who doesn't even realize that they're using a different text message protocol, it is actually a pretty big inconvenience.
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The consequences of switching are that apparently you can't accept even perfectly ordinary text messages from iphone users who you once used iMessage with. Any iphone users that were former contacts who may not have turned iMessage off on their phones will have to now switch iMessage off to continue to send any text messages to you at all unless you had the foresight to turn iMessage off when it first came out.
So the consequences of switching are felt by people who may not have ever bothered to switch... and create a ratther major inconvenience even for people may actually be informed about the consequences for themselves if or when they do, because they would then have to contact all of the people they know with an iPhone and tell them all to turn iMessage off to continue to talk to them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And that's not vendor-lock in how?
Seriously... if an iphone user switches to a non-iphone, it would make much more sense if other iphones trying to send messages to a former iphone user would fall back to ordinary text message protocols. But they don't do that... and a person who swithes from an iphone to another phone will now have to jump through hoops like what you describe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I switched from iPhone to Android after using iMessage extensively and did not have this problem. So clearly it depends on some particular status/configuration of all the involved parties.
Does this depend on:
1) Moving the SIM from your old phone to your new phone
2) Leaving your old phone on and connected to WiFi so that iMessages still sees you as being on network
Or something like that?
I know that when I switched, it was a really quick thing—new Android phone arrived via USPS, pulled my old SIM, put it into new phone, turned off old phone, and away we went. I was in mid conversation with several people and never experienced a hiccup over the course of the day. Even talked about it over SMS—complained about the default keyboard on the new phone and all kinds of stuff.
Wasn't aware of this issue and didn't experience it. What gives?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This is not really an issue when you switch phones, the problem is the other users has set to always to use iMessage. Normally, if a "message" don't reach an iPhone user in a set amount of time, the system defaults to sending it as a text. That's the default behavior of iOS out of the box. Some users have turn it off in Messages settings therefore the iMessage never delivers the message and continues to wait it out.
Why would someone turn off "Send as SMS"?
Few reasons:
1) they're on Verizon or ATT and it's $10 minimum text plan,
2) the limit before it sends as SMS is really short (something around 5 seconds), and you don't want to annoy everyone with multiple iMessage and SMS for the same message
3) the user like knowing if the message actually arrived
The point, I think, is that this feature was turned on by default... which meant iphone users were communicating via iMessage unless the explicitly disabled it.
But if you were ever using iMessage with somebody in the past, then if you switch phones, then the person you were formerly using iMessage with will no longer even be able to send you any text messages without shutting off iMgessage on their end as well.
If you don't see how that's a problem for users today who may be considering moving away from Apple products, I'm not sure what is.
Yeah, it is a problem for switchers, and those who communicate with them, and probably should be addressed in a better way. However, it isn't really a "lock-in" type of situation, in that I doubt that enough people know about it before thinking about switching to have any impact on the number of switchers. If anything, it makes it more likely that a switcher will not come back since it creates a bad "last impression".
It is challenging to figure out a way to design the system to allow for good inter-operation between iMessage (which is nicely encrypted) and the standard SMS. I think that one does want to preferentially use the more secure system when available, and it is certainly a bad idea to fall-back to a non-secure SMS without transparently. Maybe iMessage needs to always check if the phone number is associated with iMessage each time a message is sent and put up a warning "1234567890 is no longer associated with iMessage account fred@icloud.com - should I send an SMS to 1234567890 or an iMessage to fred@icloud.com ?" or something like that. Of course then we would get complaints from people who don't understand the choice.
Stupid people and people in loser countries do, evidently. The rest of us are on no-contract Virgin Mobile.
This is false... I know this is anecdotal, but I currently own an iPhone, am strongly considering switching when my contract is up (two more months), and had never once even thought about this feature of the iPhone before reading this story, and it's not something I ever would have particularly cared about, so I never once explicitly turned on iMessage on my iPhone. In spite of this, I discovered that it was indeed enabled on my device. I bought the phone brand new, so this was not something done by any previous owner. Sure looks like it's by default to me.
The problem is, apparently, once you have an iMessage session going with somebody because you've been texting back and forth between two iPhones, if *YOU* ever decide to switch platforms, but keep your phone number, unless the other iPhone user switches iMessage off on their phone as well, or else they completely delete your text messaging session from their messaging history, you will no longer receive any texts from them (your texts will go out,but any responses they make will not get received because their phone will not fall back to SMS, because it believes that you still have an iPhone. If opting out of iMessage completely only requires that the feature be turned off from the phone with a single button tap, that's fine and dandy, and entirely acceptable in my case, but what about for people who no longer have their iphone, because it got lost or destroyed, and have replaced it with an alternative platform, but kept the same phone number?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Apple group Messages go out as MMS to non-Apple phone. And if you have Google Voice, you don't receive it. Or even a warning that you might be missing Messages
No. iMessages and regular SMS coexist in the same thread. You can jump between the two at will. If you are imessaging with someone and they switch phones or just disable imessage, you'll just send out a SMS and they get a SMS.
Wait, so we have a bunch of Android fans complaining about the complexity of going to the settings screen and looking for a few toggle options. How do you actually use your Android phone? Samsungs' easy mode?
PS - this happened to me too and after my new phone didn't get the text message while my old iPhone did (without a sim card, over wifi) the first thing I thought was to turn off imessage. It's not hard people. Especially for the slashdot crowd, I really really hope.
But lets keep bashing Apple, and getting pageviews!