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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.
You can just turn of iMessages and the conversation reverts to plain text messages. It has always worked for me.
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.
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.
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 jpg files.
File -> Export works for me. If you want to access a bunch at a time, they're in [your user directory]/Pictures/iPhoto Library.
And for those who haven't followed link about the "obscure workaround":
To do this, simply tap and hold on the undelivered message and a “Send as Text Message” option should appear in the context menu. This works even when “Send as SMS” is disabled in your settings, allowing you to decide when you’d rather send a text message for expediency or simply leave it to wait until the recipient’s device is back online.
I'm not saying that Apple never does lock-in, but both those seem like pretty weak examples.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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.
Its not a big deal now, but it was when it first started happening to people and no one knew what the hell was going on.
In my case, iOS friends messages never did fall back, and they all went into the bit bucket.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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?