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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.)
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.
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)
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?
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?
For illegally knowing the alphabet that Apple patented years ago.
Why move away from text messages in the first place? Is Apple trying to learn how to embrace-extend-extinguish? Good luck with doing this against texting...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
so you think this is a reasonable user experience? first off knowing which of your contacts use imessage, and then contacting all them and tell them to screw with their phone settings?
sheesh.
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.
Text messages cost money on a lot of plans. Data is much cheaper.
>Is Apple trying to learn how to embrace-extend-extinguish?
Pretty much, but iMessage does give Apple people some capabilities that SMS lacks, so it's not all bad. It probably ducks SMS fees too.
Because in the US text messages are expensive for end users.
Here in Australia it doesn't make sense because any plan more than $20 a month has basically unlimited texts.
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?
What would be a better solution is Apple making it cross platform. This way, no matter what platform one is on, iMessages go through. This would establish iMessage as a standard, and that would be better for Apple on the long term, than only allowing their devices to use it.
And if you have an iPhone and no other Apple devices? Well, when it can no longer contact that device (or hell, assume all four of your iDevices fall off-deck while you're on a cruise), what should it do, then?
Sent from a MacBook Pro using Avatron Air Display on an iPad Air as a secondary display.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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.
YMMV. Even when roaming internationally, I don't pay anything per US text message, although I do pay for international texts (I think).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I message gives you "Reply All" and group messaging. Great for group activities.
Speed, reliability, features, cost?
I no longer need to spend an extra $15/month so AT&T can rip me off for text messages.
I no longer have to wonder if the SMS was actually delivered or if it went into a black hole and AT&T just didn't let me know.
I don't have to wonder WHEN it gets delivered, I get notified in real time.
The fact that I can send and receive messages from my Mac, my iPad, my iPhone and they show up the same on all devices regardless of which one is in front of me?
Its not limited to 140 characters, so sending long messages don't get broken apart and sent in random order?
Maps - Sending files via SMS? Not happening. MMS? Sure for certain types, which doesn't include whatever format Maps (on OSX or iOS) uses for data exchange.
You ask these questions because you've never used iMessage.
SMS and MMS suck, move on. Ideally, we'd all use XMPP but the designers thought extremely verbose XML was a brilliant idea so a 140 character text message consumes 4 or 5k of data, so its kind of shitty on underpowered devices.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So instead of using an alternative to text messages, Apple should use an alternative to text messages?
If you have other apple devices, sure... but what if that was your only apple device?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Guess it depends where you are. Here, I haven't had anything other than effectively unlimited-texts plan for years, even on very cheap feature phone plans. In fact I think even some of our old payg sims have an unlimited texts option if we top up enough each month (don't know - they are only now in kids' / emergency spare phones).
Minutes and data, on the other hand, are always limited (at easy to hit limits) unless you pay a lot more.
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
Text Messages USED to cost money. Now, nobody actually uses TXT, as we no longer have dumb phones. We use Hangouts, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, GoogleVoice, email ....
Txt was good when all you had was a feature phone.
Congrats on living in a major metropolitan area. The other 99% of the world still has to pay for texts.
I'll never get over peoples myopic view of the world.
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.
Apple has never really comprehended that monopoly behavior doesn't really work when you are a minority platform.
What would be a better solution is Apple making it cross platform. This way, no matter what platform one is on, iMessages go through
What, and lose the locking. I know several families right now that are stuck on ios because someone in the the family (usually a child or senior parent) uses an ipod touch or ipad that -can't- fall back to SMS; and it often crosses households (grandparents / grandchildren living somewhere else etc... so now the entire family is stuck on ios...)
Sure one could install a different IM... but imessages appeal is the seamless IM / SMS experience and installing a whole new program just to talk to one person, and that person ALSO has to install it ... its a genuine obstacle in this case.
And there really isn't a good cross platform IM client that has desktop, ios, android, windows phone, and blackberry support. Hell, even google talk ... er hangouts is ruled out now that there is no proper desktop client.
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.
That's how it works. The "reasonable amount of time" is 5 minutes. And any message sent within those 5 minutes will automatically be re-sent as an SMS (which unfortunately means the recipient will receive the message twice... once the iMessage finally arrives).
And there can't be any bugs, because in order to acknowledge receipt of a message you have to decrypt the message, and the decryption keys cannot be copied off the device the message is being sent to. Part of it is stored in a dedicated corner of silicone, which cannot be read by software.
Who is this 'nobody'?
When I was on the way to the airport to pick up my 65 year old father today, he texted me from his iPhone to say they had landed.
My mother and her Blackberry are the same.
Just because you may not text does not mean that there aren't plenty of people who do not have enough of an understanding to use alternative services and simply stick with what comes for 'free' and already on the device.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
You shouldn't have to do ANYTHING to switch phones.
I take it you're one of those "Steve Jobs is Jesus!" people?
I'm amazed Americans still pay for them. In most other countries any sort of contract comes with a few thousand free SMS per month. I pay about $15 for 5000 texts, 300 minutes and "unlimited" data. Includes 4G.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
_if we top up enough each month_. Yes, but if you don't, you pay per text.
Hmm, I can't find the REALLY cheap virginmobile plans at the moment, maybe they don't exist anymore (up until a few years ago when I had one, it was $5/month if you had it auto-top-up every 3 months).. But even now, the lowest $20/month top up plan I see mentions 15 cents/text. While that's really expensive, for someone who just uses it as an emergency phone, it's not really a big deal.
If you're impressed by that, you should try IMAP email!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We use an android phone running an sms server to send and receive large volumes of texts. It was cheaper to do that on a $10/month plan than to use bulk sms servers.
The term of the contract it is on say unlimited texts as long as it is "reasonable" no idea what that number is but 15k per month is apparently reasonable....
Sounds like email with receipts. Except proprietary and more limited. What great innovation will come next?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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).
Friends don't let friend iMessage.
...but when they do, nothing of value is ever lost.
$
I use MightyText on Android. It sounds a lot like what iMessage aims to be, and it works on any platform that has a web browser. I have iMessage on my macbook, but I have no idea what its good for without an iPhone... Anything?
+1 funny, I chuckled. although incorrect. on my phone I could send either a text message or an email, and my recipient could handle a text message or an email. yet in many cases I choose to send text messages. why??? they're simple, they're fast, they're "always on" at the OS level.
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 :/
I believe you can do it by editing your apple ID support profile on the web.
Stupidly easy solution is stupid. Not everyone is constantly checking their messages. It's very easy for many people to not touch their phones for longer than one day at a time.
It's only feature creep. It naturally happens to everything unless you aggressively fight against it. Text messages went from a debugging system, to basic and quick messages, to screwing the language for more data density, to sending multiple texts automatically, to including images, having groups, delivery confirmation, etc... Just like HTML was designed for displaying documents in whatever layout the user wanted, it has morphed into a partial and yet full development platform ranging from basic text, unchangeable pixel perfect (as viewed on a small subset of computers) site designs, full applications, full OSes, and 3D renders.
HTML (and related tech) is turning into the main platform because it's there and very simple (yeah right) whereas developing a standard application is too complex (but now easier than setting up and maintaining a web app). Similarly text messages are turning into emails because text messages are conceptually less formal and easier to create/send (no need to remember email address, no subject line, no hello+goodbye due to length limit, misspellings forgiven, need not grammar, etc...). Yet all those extra email features that make email more conceptually complex are actually useful and are being slowly added in.
posting to undo moderation
Is this 2002? All the plans by all the companies include unlimited texts, including low-end $30/month plans. I only know one person who pays to text (after reaching a certain amount), this person has stuck with his same phone contract for more than 10 years.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I have "unlimited" SMS on my plan. But it is only unlimited to the phones on the same network, and with number portability there is no way of knowing whether my friends have switched networks. Certainly for international SMS, I'm not aware of any plan that is truly unlimited.
Yes. Instead of using its proprietary alternative to text messages, Apple should federate with other alternatives to text messages.
Both of those options are stupid. If someone sends a text to your phone number, and that number is associated with an iMessage account then it should try to send the message via iMessage, and when it doesn't get delivered to your phone - regardless of if it gets delivered to any other devices - it should send a text to the phone number.
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.
All the plans by all the companies include unlimited texts, including low-end $30/month plans.
$30 per month is not low-end. Try $20 per 90 days (source: virginmobileusa.com).
It sounds like an implementation of a multiple-protocol IM client, but without a heartbeat ping between client and server for either of the supported protocols (and also with user identifiers that don't distinguish between which protocol the user wants to send the message on).
On an Android phone, using Hangouts, when I choose a contact that has a gchat name and a mobile phone number attached, I can switch between "SMS" and "Hangouts". Everyone with iMessage will have an Apple ID anyhow, right? Apple could use that for an iMessage username, or have a little combo-box to the side of the message being sent to choose the protocol to use. In addition, if someone unregisters a phone number from their Apple ID (which I'd imagine could be done online?), it would make sense if the system would fall back to standard SMS (or send via SMS to the phone and simultaneously to whichever devices are currently logged into iMessage).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
whereas developing a standard application is too complex (but now easier than setting up and maintaining a web app).
You can make one web application, or you can make 14 native applications: one each for Windows, Windows RT, OS X, X11/Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U, 3DS, PlayStation Vita, PS3, and PS4. By the time you've finished negotiating with the console makers just to become an authorized developer, you could have finished the web app.
Text messages cost money on a lot of plans. Data is much cheaper.
This isn't really a problem in a lot of countries.
However it's absolutely no excuse for messing with peoples texts.
Apple can prioritise their own proprietary messaging method/protocol over the standard one, but if they dont automatically fail back to the standard method when it fails there is a failure or someone leaves the system then Apple have created a problem that Apple needs to fix.
If Google did this, people would be up in arms over it. Why does Apple get defended?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This was happening to me 2 years ago. How is this just now becoming "news"?
Not defending SMS, which is pretty horrible in many ways, but SMS does support delivery receipts. They are very handy for seeing if/when a message is delivered to the recipient's phone.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Text Messages USED to cost money. Now, nobody actually uses TXT, as we no longer have dumb phones. We use Hangouts, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, GoogleVoice, email ....
Txt was good when all you had was a feature phone.
Congrats on living in a major metropolitan area. The other 99% of the world still has to pay for texts.
I'll never get over peoples myopic view of the world.
99% of people (particularly people with cell phones) live outside of metropolitan areas? This page claims about half of the worlds people live in a city.
Enigma
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.
I'm amazed Americans still pay for them. In most other countries any sort of contract comes with a few thousand free SMS per month. I pay about $15 for 5000 texts, 300 minutes and "unlimited" data. Includes 4G.
I'm very curious. What country are you in? What does "4G" mean to you (LTE, HSPA+, WiMAX)? What are the throughput speeds? Is there any cap?
"95% of all Slashdot
Better yet, that new-fangled XMPP thing.
Hell, even google talk ... er hangouts is ruled out now that there is no proper desktop client.
Google Talk is just XMPP, so any desktop IM program should support it just fine.
Pretty sure Google DOES do this, but it's through Google Voice which interacts with the SMS network more.
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
Google Talk is just XMPP, so any desktop IM program should support it just fine.
That's what I'd heard to but I've been having trouble getting it working lately with 'hangouts'. I recently tried Spark for example (from igniterealtime.org and was unable to get it to connect); although I'd had it working previously with google talk (ie "before" they forced hangouts on everyone.)
Teach them to use Email.
Says someone who doesn't know the difference between IM and email.
That wasn't my point. To be quite honest, these undeliverable messages have to be putting some measurable amount of load on the iMessage servers, on top of causing a usability problem for their users (e.g. the people who still have iPhones and are trying to send messages to their friends who no longer do), so it would be a benefit to Apple to devise a way to handle this.
Currently, it default behavior is to revert to SMS if a message goes undelivered for 5 minutes, and fall bask to SMS-only after a certain number of timeouts, until it can be confirmed that the recipient has signed back in to iMessage. This is done on the client-side and can be disabled entirely by the user, which is correct behavior on the client side, as it does allow the user to prevent the SMS fallback on their end; the problem comes when a recipient is no longer an iMessage user, regardless of reason.
A proper solution to this issue would have to be implemented on the server side. One idea that would work is to have the service disable the phone number after, say, 10 or so (just pulling a number out of my ass here, Apple would be able to determine what's appropriate based on their own data, either aggregate or per-user) messages, or a week of non-use (again, Apple would know what was appropriate based on their own data). In cases where the sender has disabled the MSM fallback on the client side, any queued failed messages could be sent via SMS from the server side when the number is disable on the recipient's account. This way, users still (eventually) get their messages and Apple can minimize SMS gateway costs by not sending messages via SMS in response to temporary issues.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
... 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.
I still have a limited text plan. No plans to upgrade, because the majority of people I "text" have iPhones. If someone with an Android starts getting chatty I switch to GV and continue the conversation.
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.
but that isn't what everyone wants. I regularly travel internationally and it is damn expensive receiving an SMS in some countries on roaming because apple couldn't just hold it's horses until I connect to wifi. The problem is when you go down these routes you mess things up for other people and make it easier for some, this is why it's a tough engineering problem.
Granted, you could just change the settings to make iMessage not bind to your cell number and have people with iPhones next your email address (it will show up as messagable last I checked) if you are worried about this.
Pretty standard for a 14yo girl.
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!
It's LTE here. There is no cap, although they do throttle torrents.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You say it works. You seem to be the only person on the planet for whom it works.
As of Kitkat, at least on the Nexus 5, hangout is the default SMS application and does this if you're not careful. It can try to start the conversation via a hangout if the contact has a gmail account, which is kind of useless if they don't have an android phone and you want to use SMS as most people do - to contact them *right now* on their phone.
You have to remember to select their phone number specifically, then it will send an SMS. It will also always reply in kind - get a text it will always reply by text.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
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)
So instead of a phone number (which is weakly pseudonymous) you have to create five accounts with the hassle of choosing pseudonyms, use real name when necessary or mandatory, manage and create the associated e-mail addresses and passwords?
Apple's proprietary alternative to text messages allows me to switch a texting conversation to phone or video and by phone I mean PSTN or IP. It also ties into things like messaging during calls. That's a low end Universal Communication system not an alternative to What'sApp. There are no free alternatives. The good alternatives are in the range of $50-400 / user / year.
Americans mostly don't pay for texts. Most postpay plans now include unlimited texting. Most prepay plans include unlimited texting. Most people who have texting limits still don't come anywhere near the limit and thus are effectively on unlimited texting.
What's the value to Apple in a cross platform standard? How do you see them monaziting that? The purpose of Apple software is to sell Apple hardware.
How exactly does it not work? On the desktop Apple has been earning something 85-92% of the hardware profits for about 7 years now. In the phone space they have well over a majority of the handset profits.
My wife is on a $15/year prepaid plan! :) Of course everything is PAYG out of that credit, like 12c/SMS, 12c/minute and 5c/MB data. Incoming SMS and calls are free. But she doesn't use it very much. And of course this is not in the USA...
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no sig for you. come back one year.
Yes, that's how iMessage works it sends to all devices it can reach. If you don't want that behavior don't register your phone number with iMessage.
And frankly the sender should know that. If they want to force it to go to your phone that's easy to do via. SMS.
I still use Kopete to connect to it, though I'm not certain if Kopete has any special handling for it buried in the source code. As far as I know, Pidgin also supports Google Talk.
Google Talk is 'dead', everything is going to Hangouts, which is not XMPP. Hence, I can't send a file via XMPP to a Hangouts user because their current bridge sucks ass and doesn't support it.
Try again.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
SMS messages aren't sent server side at all now, they are sent from the sender's client (phone). Apple doesn't hand off to the telco gateways. IMHO they should, but they don't.
iMesage is about seamless integration. The sender doesn't get to decide where the recipient gets their message using iMessage If the sender wants to force delivery to the phone then they should be using something like SMS not iMessage to send the message in the 1st place.
iMessages are in Blue
SMS are in Green
I not only know which contacts use iMessage I know which messages went to them which way.
Yes, it is reasonable, because its the way YOU'VE made the choice to get message YOUR messages via iMessage.
Y
ou don't need to know what your contacts use because it is YOUR settings that are wrong if you're no longer using an iPhone.
YOU tell iMessage that YOU want messages to YOUR phone number over iMessage.
So until you tell iMessage that YOU don't want messages delivered that way anymore, it will do what YOU told it to do.
The GP post doesn't understand the problem any better than you do.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
... so when you tell Apple that you want your phone number associated with your Apple ID for messages when you setup the phone ... its Apples fault?
Perhaps if you had bothered to read the text on the screen, you wouldn't have to do anything to switch phones, but during the phone setup process you actively made a decision to associate your phone number with an Apple ID for the purpose of messages.
How exactly is it magically supposed to understand when you no longer want that to be the case if you don't tell it so? It didn't magically know when you first set it up, you told it, now you think it has to magically know when you change your mind?
I take it you're one of those morons who talks out his ass about things he doesn't actually understands and pretends he's not a fanboy while calling everyone else one.
Grow up and get a clue.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sprint and AT&T both offer unlimited talk&text plans, and they are both nationwide carriers with a majority of their coverage areas lying outside of major metropolitcan areas. I can't speak for Verizon or T-Mobile, but I'd be surprised if they didn't offer such plans.
That being said, I prefer SMS over IP-based messaging, and everyone I know still uses SMS (not "TXT") or MMS for domestic messaging.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
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.
They do for some things, just not for iMessage. They already have the SMS gateways set up, so it would (or should, at least) be trivial for them to begin using them in this manner for iMessage. Shit, though, even if they redirect those undelivered messages to /dev/null when they deactivate the number, that would be an improvement; the important part is deactivating the number. Oh, and of course passing that information back to users who are trying to send messages to that number via iMessage. I suppose, at that point, the messages could be redirected client-side, as well, regardless of configuration, since that configuration only applies to phone numbers registered and active on iMessage.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Everyone I know, already uses alternatives to TXT (SMS/MMS) messaging. Including Facebook, Google Hangouts(Gtalk), Skype and EMAIL. TXT messaging is left over from feature phones and is a hack communication at best. The only people I know that still use TXT messages, are those that used it on Feature Phones. Yeah, I still get TXT messages, but I always feel like it is a poor hack.
Nothing like a 160 Character limit.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I have six phone numbers. Which one gets txt? Some are shared with others. And you've never accidentally texted the wrong person because you've memorized every phone number you've ever txted perfectly? Have you never heard of a Phone Book application?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
More information regarding my initial point.
https://gigaom.com/2013/04/29/...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Congrats on living in a major metropolitan area. The other 99% of the world still has to pay for texts.
Eh?
Canada. While big cities used to be the one ones that had "unlimited" plans, nowadays anywhere in the country offers unlimited calling in-country, unlimited text (for many, in-country, for Virgin Mobile it's to anywhere in the world), 2GB+ of data, etc. About $65-70 (say $60-65USD). Oh, wait, they're in the US too.
My understanding is that U.S. carrier rates are lower... but yours still ding you for... text messages? Wow, they've been free here for years. And we're talking places with a population of 7k here. Hell, they're available in the town about 1h away that has a population of 700.
Also free in the parts of Asia I've been to (worldwide text, often enough). Not 100% sure about Europe in general but I believe those are free as well based on people I know in various areas. My German is fairly rusty but I'm pretty sure that Frei-SMS und Frei-MMS follows that.
New Zealand... Texts included (as well as to Aus)
Australia... SMS unlimited in-country
So, by 99% of the the world... I'm guessing you mean with your carrier in USA? Who is being myopic?
So... Basically nothing that I couldn't already do with Google Hangouts and/or SMS.
Sounds wonderful. ?
Which is orthoganal to the issue of Apple trying to behave like an abusive monopoly while being a minority platform. Apple's profits are in spite of their attempts to be an abusive monopoly. Not because of it.
Sorry, did I post to slashdot.jp by accident?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
How do you know that? What's your evidence?
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.
History.
I am aware of such trends with many a youth, but that does not mean that 'nobody' != 'Everyone I know'.
As said by myself and others... texting remains an important thing to many a person who may be outside of your circle as well as mine.
Hell, I demand that anyone sending me a text message reimburse me the 25 cent cost for me to receive it (as I have no texting plan).
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Wow that's fucked up. Why not do a class action lawsuit?
against the providers that do that sort of thing. A quarter by received message, that's nuts.
iMessages are in Blue
SMS are in Green
how the fuck do i know that from my android phone that i now use?
If you are on an Android phone you are the recipient not the sender of messages. The claim was senders wouldn't know.
okay, how does the send know i'm not receiving the messages then? neither side knows. sheesh. or is the sender just supposed to figure out for themselves that if someone hasn't responded in X days they should find the workaround online and apply? yep, sounds pretty darn reasonable to me.
sheesh.