Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
Pretty standard for a 14yo girl.