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Apple Releases iMessage Deregistration Utility
tlhIngan writes When moving from an iPhone to something else, if you were an avid user of iMessage, you may find your messages missing, especially from iOS-using friends. Indeed, it has been such a problem that there are even lawsuits about it. While Apple has maintained that users can always switch off iMessage, that only works if you still have your iOS device. Unless one also has other iOS devices or a Mac, they may not even realize their friends have been sending messages that are queued up on Apple's services via iMessage. Well, that problem has been resolved with Apple creating a deregistration utility to remove your phone number from the iMessage servers so friends will no longer send you texts via iMessage that you can no longer receive. It's a two-step process involving proof of number ownership (via regular SMS) before deregistration takes place.
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grass is greener.
When I read Slashdot,
I play with my weiner.
Call me when they allow cross-system forwarding like another phone number or Hangouts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Took them long enough. What was that about 30 minutes of dev time?
While I'm still on iOS myself, this was a long overdue issue. It's incredibly frustrating to have to switch on/off imessage to send messages to people who have moved over to android. iMessage was/is a great idea, but it took a bit too long for this bug fix to be resolved.
... to your grandma that if she wants to receive text message on their new Android/Nokia/... phone, she needs to turn off iMessage in their iPhone BEFORE activating her new mobile. Or if she forgot to do it, she just have to access an obscure Apple web page to do it. Thanks Apple for SMS service hijacking!
The real issue is that you can't opt out of automatically having your phone number become and account/id in iMessage.
I want to use iMessage on my iPhone, but only with regular iCloud accounts, not with the phone number being used to create an account.
Unfortunately, the iOS team doesn't give the user that option.
I actually like the idea behind iMessage: If you have internet access, sending a message via internet is potentially much cheaper than via SMS (unless you have an unlimited SMS plan). Even Apple's implementation of iMessage isn't too bad.
The problem is that it's lock-in to Apple devices, of course. If Apple could get their head out of the sand and create a unified protocol with Google and whoever is left in the smartphone OS field (BlackBerry?, Mozilla?), it would be fantastic. Especially if the protocol was expanded a bit. Imagine being able to share files like via dropbox, but seemlessly through an SMS app?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I still still send / receive SMS. It's the one universal method to reach someone (other than calling).
Universal among cell phone users that is. How many land line providers render SMS using text to speech?
Instead of dealing with a bunch of different apps I just use iMessage app for SMS and iMessage.
So what do you use to talk to people who use not-Mac PCs or Android tablets?
Texting is unlimited. Data is not.
Even if this is true of the plan to which you subscribe, it may not be true of plans to which other people subscribe. Consider someone with a PC at home and a $7/mo pay as you go flip phone. In this case, data is unmetered (or damn close to it at 300 GB/mo) and texts are 20 cents each: 10 to send and 10 to receive.
A utility for getting all my photos out of iPhoto, and all my data out of Time Machine?
AFAIK Time Machine uses local storage. Then again I don't use iCloud, so maybe that's an option that I don't know about.
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I was made aware of this by a friend of mine who recently moved, he switched his number, sent some "new number" texts. And replies from his friends were sent to the person who had his new number before him. He's never had an Apple device. Ever, and he was affected by this, in a much worse way than the usual "you don't get your texts" explanation. He was telling people "Hey this is me" those people then think: hey this is Joe, I can be sure it's him because he told me who he is. They then could respond with some personal information, and Apple sends it off to someone else. Luckily this didn't happen as far as I know but it's a scary thought.
For iPhoto: Select all of your photos... choose Export from the File menu. Pick "Original" as the format, pick a directory to dump them all into. Not sure what you mean about "all my data out of Time Machine". Almost like asking "all my data out of my ZFS filesystem" (and I mean _all_, not just the current state. Each and every snapshot I have ever made...).
and sent the queued up imessages via SMS then sent a message to the client that sent the imessage that the recipient is now SMS only.
Or just open the iPhoto app as a folder, browse into the folders and copy the files out yourself.
A utility for getting all my photos out of iPhoto, and all my data out of Time Machine?
You mean something that reads the HFS+ filesystem?
Time Machine backups are copies of your files. If you have software that can read your original files then that very same software can also open the copy of the file that Time Machine made. You do not need Time Machine's interface to read these files.
If you use Time Machine on a network drive then there's an additional step of mounting the disk image it creates, which is left as an exercise to the reader.
It's stupid that people need to do this, but they *have* been able to do this for years with just three steps:
It's the last step that removes your device's UUID from all Apple service bindings related to your AppleID.
So dear Apple. What happens when I get a recycled phone-number, and that number previously was owned by a person using iMessage.. Why not auto-unsubscribe numbers/users if they have been inactive for a given time-period of a week or two??
All my other friends a cellphone on them 24/7. So an SMS reaches them right away.
Which country? In my country, pay-as-you-go cellular subscribers have to pay to receive each text message, so costing them money by hitting them with 5 texts in a row might not seem so friendly.
I went back to my old iPhone temporarily, but when I switched back to my android I wasn't getting some people's text messages. Thanks to this post, I know why! Went online to deregister my phone number and problem solved. It is a bummer to think how many text messages are now lost floating in cyber space.
I've been "losing" messages since I got a second hand iPad. Some messages show up on the iPad but not my iPhone 4S. Seems the problem exists when two apple devices are available, not necessarily apple/droid.
I mean, getting removed from iMessage is not really something that Apple planned.
Even if you deregister from iMessage, it might take 45(!!!) days till your phone number gets removed from all databases.
http://www.businessinsider.com...