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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
If you're impressed by that, you should try IMAP email!
"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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
Getting texts on multiple devices (computer especially) is certainly a worthwhile feature. The end-run around ridiculous text fees for those without unlimited plans is also fantastic. I just wish it was more open. I'd like to see an Android and a Windows iMessage client. Making those available would make iMessage more useful, even for Apple's own customers.
Pretty standard for a 14yo girl.
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.