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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.'"
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.