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Apple To Face Lawsuit For iMessage Glitch
An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about iPhone users switching over to Android-powered phones and no longer being able to receive text messages from friends and family still using iPhones. Well, a woman with exactly this issue has filed a lawsuit against Apple, complaining that '[p]eople who replace their Apple devices with non-Apple wireless phones and tablets are "penalized and unable to obtain the full benefits of their wireless-service contracts."' To be specific, '[t]he suit is based on contractual interference and unfair competition laws.' She is seeking class action status and undetermined damages."
This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
Not an Apple hater, but I went through all of the correct steps to disconnect iMessage when switching to Android and had the exact same issues. Text messages wouldn't come through from iPhone users, at all, period. This is completely within Apple's control even if they aren't claiming it- the SMS protocol should always be used as a backup when iMessage transmission doesn't successfully complete. Otherwise, it's purely noncompetitive and is a maneuver to keep you on Apple's platform.
As an IT Architect, who daily works with and for those with varying degrees of technical skills, I would disagree that the user is "an idiot". The steps you mention will certainly address the issue no doubt. What is in question is if the layperson should be aware of these steps and be capable of undertaking them "if" they forget to disable iMessage. What a class action lawsuit will do is force Apple to put in checks that look at the IMEI of the phone each time an iMessage is sent and the ack isn't received by the server from the phone in x amount of time. There is a different error message for an IMEI either offline or registered to a new user than one where the phone is simply unavailable. I can think of 5 different ways Apple can identify the device changed to a non Apple device. They haven't fixed this issue on purpose. Creating an issue like this undoubtedly ensures a percentage of users return their Android phones and get another Apple device to fix the texting issue thereby ensuring Apple revenue. You can bet Apple will weigh the cost of the suit versus the customer retention revenue and either pay out and leave it the way it is or fix the problem. There's no doubt it is a problem because it's not automated and the courts will rule in favor of the user because the process is not automated.
I have an iphone. I never turned on any setting related to imessages. I still received imessages from other iphone users and would be pretty annoyed if the communication failed because of switching to a new phone.
It's turned on by default if you set up iCloud services, which people generally do to sync their address book, apps, and other content via "the cloud". That in turn is tuned on by default if you have push notifications turned on at all (which requires an Apple ID, and is how iMessage notifications happen, generally quicker than SMS notifications over the cellular providers networks (and the carrier bridge, if the sender and recipient aren't subscribed with the same carrier in the same geographic region).
Not only that, they is no indication that messages aren't being delivered.
There's a visual indicator on the sender's phone of a green vs. a blue "talk bubble" background color to indicate something sent via iMessage vs. SMS. Yeah, this isn't terrifically called out.
The notification will occur after the 45 days have elapsed (actually, it depends on when they run the batch job; it's generally 28 days +/- 14 days). But yeah, the notification is internal to the system.
I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.
Poor setup on Apples part and clearly designed to hook people in.
I think it was more a cultural blind spot; in order to anticipate this being a problem, they'd have to consider the idea that someone might want to use a phone other than an iPhone, which is kind of unthinkable if you are an engineer whose livelihood is tied to building iPhone services... "Why in heck would anyone want to use software other than the software I wrote, which is the niftiest software evar?".
They have a settings mechanism on the iPhone that would take care of this, but if you dropped your iPhone in a toilet and killed it, you wouldn't be able to use that if instead of buying a replacement iPhone, ho used something else.
There's the online mechanism via appleid.apple.com, as previously noted, but I think that's a workaround. For number portability to another phone, which generally comes with a carrier contract and a new SIM (or a CDMA ID), they'd get the notification through the phone number portability act due to the carrier contract (this is half the source of the 45 days for the automatic cutover), but slamming the SIM around between phones that are iPhones and non-iPhones, there's really no network notifications that take place back to Apple that the change has occurred.
One possible workaround, and I will bet it's the one that gets put in place, should this suit be considered to have merit, rather than being a user error (it's definitely a user error, and Apple isn't really responsible for third party equipment not having the notification back to the Apple ID to dissociate it) would be to note failure to contact on the iMessage sends more promptly, and, worst case secondary settlement, probably retransmit them via SMS gateway.
This last is unlikely to happen, since it'd need to forge the source address as the original senders phone #, rather than the gateway, which would require additional agreements with all the carriers. I'm going to guess that the carriers won't be very cooperative in this, since they made about $10B last year in SMS charges worldwide, which is why Facebook was willing to pay $19B for "WhatsApp". Why cooperate with someone who is trying to disrupt your business model and reduce your profits, after all?