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Apple's Revenge: iMessage Might Eat Your Texts If You Switch To Android
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.'"
to return back to the flock to receive your iMessages again.
Clearly the fix is for the sending party to also switch to android.
My experience is that if an iPhone is unable to send an iMessage (shows as blue), it automatically falls back to text message after 5 minutes (shows as green). After a few of these in a row, it defaults to text message until the iMessage connection can be re-established with the other endpoint. (Of course, this option can be turned off if you prefer to use only iMessages, at which point it's not going to be allowed it to fall back.)
What an idiotic statement. There's a very easy solution. If user has not been available on iMessage for more than reasonable amount of time, no more than a day, fall back to SMS.
Stupidly easy solution.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts5185
Seems one just needs to deactivate iMessage before getting rid of their device.
Ok, this is stupid.
I recently switched from iPhone, and had text messages still going to my iPad. A simple google search revealed pages like:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5450235
And many other such solutions.
That requires having or borrowing an iphone or ipad (Basically, go to settings, iMessage, login with you apple id then tell it not to use iMessage for your phone number).
According to:
http://www.imore.com/text-issues-switching-iphone-android-heres-fix
You can call 1-800-MY-APPLE and have them do it.
Or take your sim and put it back in your iPhone and turn off iMessage. It disconnects your phone number from iMessage.
I have seen this complaint ever since iMessage was released and I call BS. This is *by design*. If you associate a phone # with your Apple ID, then every time another iOS user opens a message thread to your phone # it's routed to iMessage. You need to un-register your phone # if you want this to stop.
Consider this scenario:
1) I activate iMessage on my iPhone, iPad, iPod, & MacBook
2) As expected, when anyone using the defaults on an iPhone (or other Apple device) sends me a message, it's routed via iMessage and delivered to all 4 of my devices.
3) I drop by iPhone in the toilet, and replace it with a non-Apple mobile phone
4) Someone sends me an iMessage to my phone number.
--> Should this go through (and be delivered to my 3 remaining Apple devices)?
--> Of should iMessage magically know that I flushed my iPhone down the crapper and reject the request, causing the sending iPhone to send the message via SMS?
I would argue that the first option is the "correct" option.
It happens to conversation that were previously carried out that way. Delete the conversation and start over. It can still happen if the iMessage account was activated in another iDevice or Mac. The message will be received correctly via iMessage and not via SMS.
Not sure if this works but the easy fix seems to be that you change your Apple password. Then the iMessage app can't authenticate and dumps your messages back to SMS.
Going to https://supportprofile.apple.c... and making sure my old phone was removed was what eventually fixed this for me. Just putting the SIM back in and turning off iMessage did not fix it.
It was a while ago, so it's possible this might not be the exact right location; but, I do know that it was "removing registered devices" that I did. This seems right.
IIRC this is actually an issue with the sending devices not being aware that the target contact no longer has iMessage enabled.
It's trickier than it seems because iMessage will route to your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It doesn't know if you just haven't signed in recently or if you're gone forever. If I read a message on my Mac, it is a successful delivery, even if I tossed my iPhone in a lake and swore off cell phones forever.
Apple should add a portal to manage this on icloud.com so you can see all your devices and enable/disable them from iMessage. Then the iMessage servers should reply when a device certificate is used that is disabled or deleted, causing the sending device to update its records.
Remember - Apple acts as a key exchange system but the actual private keys only exist on individual devices; the sending device re-encrypts the message for each recipient.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
What is this click bait bullshit title?, /. is supposed to be better than Reddit. This isn't a bug in the traditional software sense. This isn't a "much larger problem" unless you are a mindless drone that can't be bothered to use the settings menu of your pocket sized computer. This is nothing more than your run of the mill user experience fuck up.
Here is how to fix it: tell your iPhone to send texts to your non iPhone friend via SMS. Bam, done. Delete the contact and re add it or ask Siri to do it for you or whatever, this isn't a big deal at all.
iMessage was a fix to a price issue, a political issue, and a control issue.
If cell phone companies weren't charging so much for something that should be free Apple would have had less incentive to come up with a solution that worked around them.
We should have extended sms/mms to include encryption and for it to be free worldwide. Instead we get a bunch of solutions that don't work with one another.
If only there was a text messaging service that works amongst all phones, even the dumbphones from before the smartphone era. You could send your short message from any phone, and any phone could receive them, irrespective of carrier and country. You could even tie it to the mobile phone number instead of whatever iMessage uses.
This would solve these problems. I would call this new service SMS, short for Short Message Service.
Its a novel idea that fixes all these problems. How come Apple's smart and intelligent Engineers couldnt think of this?
I had this problem a month ago, seems that iOS7 defaults to off for send as SMS if imessage not avail/confirmed. once its turned on and a couple test text messages then it worked just fine and switched over to SMS automatically, its under settings/messages. problem is if the other person doesn't tell you they are now on android then your none the wiser
And the fix to that is to get an android!
Here are 2 obvious fixes. 1, don't buy an iPhone in the first place or otherwise you switch as well and 2. can't you delete their number and name as a contact and enter is slightly differently like "john smith 2" with the same # and it won't know it's the same?
Friends don't let friend iMessage.
And what if the device is destroyed? Sometimes switching isn't compelled as a matter of choice, but rather lack of choice to say on the same device.
For illegally knowing the alphabet that Apple patented years ago.
This guy looks like a real douche now... Apple Fanboyism at its best.
Dupe from a couple of months ago: Apple's Messages Offers Free Texting With a Side of iPhone Lock-In Posted by timothy on Saturday March 01, 2014
Time to copy all high moderated posts from the older article. Actually, there is no need: given that the purpose of posting this article is to bring the echo chamber rambling that this is why apple suck, simply posting "that's why I don't have an iPhone" is enough for +5 insightful.
Changing the contact information so that imessage stop thinking it's an iphone on the other side?
Perhaps the friend should have read this story (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2013/11/28/switching-from-iphone-to-android-switch-off-imessage/), posted back in November last year, describing how to switch from iPhone to Android. That blog post actually points back to a post by Google's Eric Schmidt (https://plus.google.com/+EricSchmidt/posts/JcfVoJhW2Kw). "News" from last year?
There is a field associated with every phone number in the iOS address book indicating location/type of device. Simply set iMessage to only be used if this field is set to 'iPhone'.
"it just works"
"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" Yea um let me correct that, "We know how to fix it but we don't want to give any benefits to a competing OS cause we are assholes like that"
First they lock you in, then they lock you out...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I message gives you "Reply All" and group messaging. Great for group activities.
I am actually ok with an "abstract texting" application replacing SMS with another protocol. People just want to "send a text" and don't really care about how it gets there. That's ok, even good. What's not ok is that the other protocol is something nonstandard that no one else is able to (probably even legally allowed to) implement. Why the fuck is this "iMessage" instead of just XMPP/Jabber or something like that? For that: 10 points from House Apple. It's like we're back in the 1990s again, with people emailing MS Word documents to each other, knowing that only one application could read MS Word documents. You know better than that! Your parents knew better than that and your kids probably know better too. Ridiculous.
iPhone: the phone for the modern Microsoftie. You missed getting fucked, didn't you?
My wife broke her iPhone so she switched back to her old non-iPhone until we could afford a new one. I kept seeing similar issues where my iPhone would insist using iMessage for her number and would hang trying to send a text. Solution was to tap and hold on the message, after hitting send, and select send as text message. It would keep sending as a text for a while but I'd have to eventually "remind" it when it would forget.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
the solution is quite simple. don't fuck with people's text messages, stop rerouting them to imessage or icloud or whatever icrap is the vogue marketing blurb of the moment.
I'm happy to see others drawing attention to this annoying issue. I ended up switching to Sprint after Verizon and Apple were powerless to help me when I swapped my Iphone for an Android. I tried having my friends with iPhones delete my contact info, add me under a new name, etc. Nothing seemed to work. A quick Google search will show you that many others have had this problem.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
This "bug" almost got my buddy arrested. Apple needs to take this problem seriously before the courts do.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
"...When my best friend upgraded from an iPhone 4S to a Galaxy S4..." - 'upgraded'; that's a matter of perspective...
I've used an iPhone and I couldn't give it up fast enough, it's a horrid platform that appears put together by children, this issue just backs that up.
Call apple care and explain that she no longer has an apple product. This happened to me also. They can flip a switch and make it right.
Yup, Apple is still the undisputed king of vendor lock-in. More so than Microsoft and Google, I would say (though they're also doing their best).
I always thought text messaging in general had no guarantee of delivery. So, couldn't one just consider this to be just another non-guaranteed part to the method of delivery? It really should be a seperate service on its own, or at the least have a way to ensure that the other device is no longer alive if you're going to be overiding a default service.
Turned off imessage - nada. had all my friends change me from iphone to mobile in their contacts. nada. updated my apple account credentials - fixed it for some people. still not 100%.
...could be worse.
Group messages on iPhones are sent as MMS and routinely discarded by Google Voice.
Receipt is strictly a Google Voice problem, but iPhones decide secretly how to send messages :/
posting to undo moderation
Now, nobody actually uses TXT, as we no longer have dumb phones.
So long as U.S. smartphone service costs 5 times as much as dumbphone service ($35 vs. $7 per month according to virginmobileusa.com), some thrifty people will stick to dumbphones.
Hard to understand why people remain so beholden to vendor-locked apps like iMessage, or (especially) ANYTHING related to the abomination that is SMS. Sure Blackberry took a while to come to jesus on the issue, but since they made BBM entirely platform-agnostic (there are versions available for Android, iOS, BB10 and (soon!) Windows), it's the best messaging application on the planet. BBM is also ENTIRELY free of SMS (which surely the FUCK, MUST. DIE. IN. A. FIRE.) and does not require you to share ANY personal information in order to communicate with someone else (makes it perfect for online dating!). It's secure, it offers every feature that you could ask for (voice/video-over-IP, file attachments of any type (not just pictures!), screen/app sharing, channels, groups, "stickers", etc)... There's not really any technically valid reason to reject it, from people I've spoken-to, it seems like the excuse you always get centers around the usual human reticence to embrace any kind of change, even for the better...
-AC
This was happening to me 2 years ago. How is this just now becoming "news"?
It does if you believe that the majority platform is operating in violation of the law. So Apple sues competitors which it believes to infringe its government-granted exclusive rights.
And there really isn't a good cross platform IM client that has desktop, ios, android, windows phone, and blackberry support.
Of course there is. It's called Internet Relay Chat.
This is not "new" and should not be a top story. Here is a forum post started June 13, 2013 regarding this same issue. That same article discusses pretty much everything I have seen here, and gives the same fixes. Vodafone has a video posted from August 8th 2013 for how to fix the most common causes of this problem which can be found here.
Slashdot has had discussion on this same topic, and nope I am not going to google that for people too.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This guy here has posted the answer :
http://apple.slashdot.org/comm...
It's been discussed before, it's not the end of the world.
What _IS_ fucking stupid is Google utterly ruined the SMS application for shitty hangouts _AND_ they still haven't cloned / stolen the functionality of iMessage properly. For goodness sakes, just copy Apple already. The Apple solution is how it should work, attempt IP based message, if it fails revert to SMS //__and make it fucking seamless to the end user__//
Hangouts is an abortion, honestly as someone who switch to Android 3 years ago now, I'm really getting tired of Google focusing on un-important shit and worrying about uglifying things than improving stuff.
Just to be clear, "an Apple support person" did not say that. Nor would they. Ever. A tech calling Apple's engineering team clueless about anything? Surely you jest.
The original writer, Adam Pash, was clearly paraphrasing what the tech "explained" (his word) in his post at http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014... - and even used bullet points to group the general themes, rather than quotes, to make it abundantly clear it wasn't a direct quote. The tech probably said something like "the engineering team isn't yet sure what the best course of action is," or something similarly honest-yet-noncommittal. Pash decided to simplify that as "clueless."
Selena Larson on ReadWriteWeb, for her part, changed "explained" to "told" (slight difference there, the latter being more direct, which this wasn't), and then our own redletterdave (or perhaps timothy) managed to change it to a direct quote. What is this, some twenty-first-century game of telephone? And we wonder why people still don't take online news seriously. Sigh.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
How is this news? its like saying "i told my mailman to text my dad the contents of a letter i handed him,but my dad doesnt have a phone". if he would have done his job and sent her the letter it would arrive fine. imessage is gross software that tries to amalgamate everything and avoid sms (kudos, fees can be annoying), but it doesnt do it by saying "john has imessage, but i am sending him an sms, so use sms in this case because he sms'd me", it says "ALL CONTACTS ARE APPLE CONTACTS, no matter how they came in in the first place.". this is a known, documented and super annoying problem for many swappers. go to blackberry, android, linux, i dont know, tizen, windows phone? its always the same. if you have an account with apple and your phone number is on whatever apple calls your profile (icloud? iMAnnoyed?) and you dont disable your devices from that service you do not continue to receive replies to sms's that you had previously sent.
I understand why this is difficult, but have found a repeatable (easy-ish) fix.
On the iPhone (and this sucks, because it's for the people trying to send you a SMS [not you on your new Android device]):
1) Turn off iMessage (from the Settings)
2) Go and send a SMS to the phone number of the Android device.
3) Turn back on iMessage
-Note: If this doesn't work, before #1; delete the number from the contact and add it back after #1.
the IronGhost
telegram is cross platform and does everything imessage does.
I'm not sure what their profit model is and who is snooping on your messages however...
... that Apple has no idea how to do online services :) :)
While my phone/tablet/laptop are all Apple, because both the hardware and the OS are much better than the competition, I never tried to activate iCloud/iMessage and other stuff like that simply because I knew there would be trouble.
My contacts are synced with a google account
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
... it's time to find a new best friend.
Love
Apple.
Going to https://supportprofile.apple.c... and unregistering your iOS device fixes this like it's designed to.
How is Apple supposed to know if you are no longer using iMessage if you simply remove your SIM and sell your iOS device without unregistering iMessage otherwise?
Hmm. I've got a spare iPhone available, and I was thinking of giving it a test drive. It's soon time to change phones, and I've never had an iPhone.
Sounds like I better steer clear of iPhone after all, to avoid nasty surprises. FUD worked! Except sounds like this is actually true, and all these Apple fans saying people with this problem are stupid, that doesn't help here.
A button that says "I'm migrating to not-Apple". Siri: Are you sure? Me: Yes. Siri: Please stay with me, I need you. Me. Nope.
I have multiple devices, my friends have multiple devices.
There's no chat that works from multiple devices to multiple devices reliably. Which confuses me.
Traditional chats only works from one device to another device. There's no server sharing of information.
XMPP goes to only one device once that device has replied. That means that if the receiver is switching devices (goes from PC to phone to leave the house), messages might be lost and there's no history on the phone.
Message carbons tries to solve this - I think - but few clients support it, and even when it works, it doesn't solve the lock problem when leaving the house.
Google Talk is worse, instead of doing a handover to another device it steals the messages and sends you a Google Mail. Yay?
But this (the topic), I think, is one step worse.
I have a feeling we should revert to one of the original standards, in the spirit of Bitcoin (it pays to be first). Therefore the options are ICQ, or a MIRC variant. Jabber is obviously a good modern choice if ICQ isn't used. Why ICQ? Because it let's you send messages when the user is offline and they receive them when the user comes online. P2P would be a viable alternative too!
The latest version of Google Hangouts already solved this issue.
Next to the area that lets you enter text for your message is an icon that can be tapped to select whether or not you want to message to be sent via Hangouts or SMS. The problem here is that Apple are treating iMessage as being synonymous with SMS, something which is not actually the case in reality.
This change to Hangouts instantly made it more usable as an SMS application for me (All it's missing now is message search)
I think its been clear for a long time that Apple only cares about its ecosystem and rarely concerns itself beyond the Apple walled garden of compatibility. Only a few times such as with iTunes and Safari has Apple even attempted to make its products work in a foreign OS or device. Mostly because they saw opportunity for profit and a need to widen its product appeal. Most who live outside Apple's walled garden understand even if you like Apple products, you must realize that unless you have a exclusive group of friends and business associates who also embrace a Apple ecosystem. That you will almost certainly come up against the limitations of Apple products in the "real" world. Mainly their cloud services suffer from lack of willingness to address that not everyone wants to live in a Apple world or in fact can.
As much as I am impressed with Apple's mobile services, I am dismayed at its lack of thought of compatibility outside of Apple. The lack of openness is going to hurt Apple as many people begin to adopt technology of different forms and with different operating systems. Right now, Apple does not even try to make their system work well outside of Apple. So I guess choose your friends wisely and make sure they embrace Apple fully.
//May need to tweak date
if((dateSInceRecipentLastSeenOniMessage - DateTime.Now).days > 1)
{
iMessage.dispacthMessageViaSMS(message);
}else
{
iMessage.dispacthMessageViaINET(message);
}
We had the same issue when my wife switched to a windows phone, our solution was to go into ALL apple devices attached to her account and turn off iMessage, took a little while for the system to realize the devices were gone and start sending texts, and the odd part was that it was faster for some people then others, where the others took a couple of days.
Anyone else getting a sense of deja vu here? It feels like we've been here a handful of times already and it's been done to death. Please, write articles about things people care about...
I switched and AT&T directed me to the site to disable imessage at the time I deactivated the iPhone and activated my Moto X. It seemed standard as part of their process.
Hangouts is googles version of iMessage...I use it on my iPhone to chat with all my android peeps. Almost started using it more often than imessage;-)
This has been known for a very long time. Too bad more people aren't aware. I find the best solution is to never use an iPhone in the first place. :)
Let me get this right.
Your friend stops using iMessage.
You send her a message with iMessage.
You weirdly expect her to magically get the message despite the fact that she is no longer using that service?
Riiight...
Maybe you need to fall back to old technology like her phone, email or your two feet.
Hold it right there: we already need to change the requirements. (When did you write this text that you're pasting, 1996?) People want one that works on all computers and networks, not just handhelds on a particularly special version of a wireless network. If you recall, there used to be something called SMS, and everybody totally hated it and vowed to replace it with something usable, ASAP.
Actually, that requirement can probably be sacrificed, but if those can be included too, ok. I agree with you that "more is better."
I would never suggest iMessage because it's proprietary and therefore hardly anything works with it, so I don't know (and can't know, probably even by law) anything about it, but we've got a mistake here too. You definitely, for sure, absolutely DO NOT want whatever addressing system you use, to be tied to some kind of "mobile phone number." Most computers don't even have mobile phone numbers, and they're hard to create and get. It's not like you can just ask the nearest DHCPd for a phone number, and it's even harder to have multiple computers share this address so that you can read your messages everywhere.
Eww. Overall in very general terms, I sort of like where you have been going with this idea, but for fuck's sake, please please PLEASE don't call it that. Those words are already associated with a sort of similar application that is already known failure, where pretty much 100% of the American population totally hates it to death and wishes pain and suffering on anyone who sucks them back into that shithole. That's like calling your new car model "Pinto," or your new video interoperability-guarantee standard that open source players are allowed to implement "DVDCSS", or your new windowing system "Windows." Please, keep working on the name. If you want people to use it, then the public needs to know it doesn't suck nearly as bad as the classical "SMS" thing that people used a decade ago.
Because they're not trying to solve problems for users; they're trying to solve problems for the company. No person should ever use an Apple mobile product, but if you sell Apple mobile products then it makes sense to try to trick as many users as possible, into getting locked into your protocols. This is a zero sum game, so users must lose if Apple is to win. Working against the interests of the users is what you should expect Apple's smart and intelligent engineers to do. That users are hating the consequences of using a weird protocol, suggests the engineers were successful in demonstrating their intelligence.
i like that iMessage works across devices, including not just ipad but macs. macs can recieve imessages at any time, not just when an ichat window is open. so it's finally a viable messaging system that is baked into the OS. from my computer I can send messages to any iphone or any other mac. it's actually really powerful.
Yap as long as you stay in the brotherhood all is well.
This is not new at all. I had the exact same problem years ago.
Let's see: tele-phone, def, to speak at a distance.
Maybe you could use your xPhones and make a call and *TALK* to someone, rather than being so completely terrified of other human beings.....
mark
PS: the content of the one and only text message I ever sent: girl, I'm not your boyfriend. You've got the wrong phone #
Another issue with iMessage is if you have unlimited text, but limited data. Turning off iMessage has similar down sides where messages vanish into the void or go to other devices. iMessage should have more controls for cellular data like only loading images/videos if you click on them. Same for iCloud.
This story doesn't show up on the mobile site.
There's a feature here that everyone who uses iPhones should learn. When the iPhone sends it as an iMessage, it tells you in multiple ways. It says "iMessage" in the background of the text box you are typing in. The message you send shows up in a BLUE bubble. If you don't want to send as iMessage, but as SMS text instead, then AFTER you send it as an iMessage, touch the blue text bubble you just sent, and an option bar will show up above the message, which includes the option "SEND AS TEXT". Select that to make your phone re-send the message as a text message. The text bubble will turn GREEN to indicate it was sent as text instead of as iMessage.
Change the contact. On the contact that switched, to the left of the number you can select the type of phone being used. Change from iPhone to mobile, and the issue will be fixed.
Try this: Class Action Lawsuit
i think samsung is on top op the market at the moment with htc and sony
Doesn't help a lot of people, but if you decide to switch, make sure you turn iMessage OFF before trading your phone in...that will avert this incredibly frustrating crisis.
http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/
The majority of the world's population now lives in urbanized areas. While not all of them necessarily live in "major" metropolitan areas, the percentage who do so is clearly more than 1%. The population of New York City alone, not even counting the wider metropolitan area, is 2.64% of the US population as of 2012 (according to WolframAlpha).
You may or may not be myopic yourself, but you are certainly either bad at math or prone to hyperbole.