Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages. Maybe stuff like this happening is a good thing as it drills home the point the 'crazy free software lunatics' have been going on about for some time. Having this kind of thing happen to someone makes the stuff FSF+co says a bit more relevant and ultimately helps everyone.
> Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages.
Apparently blaming the victim is totally okay as long as the victim was using a brand you don't like.
You've failed to understand on two levels. One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job.
Two, calling this victim blaming is a bit of a stretch at best and ridiculous nonsense at worst. Yes, what happened to OP is unfortunate but it's just a moderate inconvenience. It's not like someone drove their car over him or smashed his face in with a bat (he'll get over this much easier). The person you replied to therefore is not wishing serious ill will on him. They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software.
>One, this is not a question of competing brands. That's a question of technology and not liberty, which is the point of the comment you replied to; if OP choose free software, it doesn't matter which "brand" he chose, there are a number of free application that do the same job.
I call BS. If OP choose free software we could AS WELL have had the same exact problem.
It's a software bug -- the client caching the remote method to use (data or standard SMS). A free program could just as well have the same issue.
What "more control" you'd have? You could issue a bug fix request, which could just as well be ignored (I've several on FOSS projets). Or you could even have it fixed, but then you'd need to convince all the users you talk to to update to the latest version until you see any improvement.
If it was an open protocol, he would have access to apps that implement it on his phone. And even if that weren't the case, he would have the ability to write an implementation.
The difference here is that a sufficiently competent person cannot reliably replicate the experience.
The problem at this point is with the other friends and family who make use of this software. Great, he writes a new implementation of this protocol that prevents _his_ client from improperly caching routing information. This still doesn't fix the problem of the software on other peoples' phones.
> They are simply saying they hope this mild inconvenience
If you read the post, you would know this is not a "mild inconvenience" for him. If you truly believe that, then I would contend you haven't experienced what it's like to lose a significant amount of personal data.
> is enough to wake him (and others) up to the necessity of free software.
What free software was he and everyone he's communicated with in the past 5 years supposed to be aware of?
I don't know that RyanZAG is so much being user-hostile as reminding us that there are facts of non-free systems that are going translate to user-hostile for at least some subset of users.
There's incentives for people who make closed systems to make the most common edges of them comfortable. There's also incentives for them to ignore other sharp edges or to even actively make other edges nearly untraversable.
I came here to say exactly this. Source: I work in the guts of some of the biggest telecom networks on the planet.
Federation is a problem because none of the standards interop. The closest thing we had was XMPP which became mega-bloatware as time went by and is now just not something anyone wants to implement (and it's becoming less of an issue as most of the players move away from open-ness).
While the technical among us understand the ramifications of these decisions, the silent majority do not. I believe it was Elad Gil who said that services that eschew privacy have historically dominated their more private opponents. Users say they care about privacy but their explicit value systems (what they say versus what they do) says otherwise. The majority of consumers are happy to take iMessage and use it to the extreme and will attribute silent failures to the operators in most cases (which is not necessarily wrong).
True federated identity is the death of the phone network and there are just too many billions of dollars tied up in the world for this to come to pass. A phone number is a ridiculously arbitrary identifier for a person, and yet it works and has worked for quite some time. Logically addressed networks are finally starting to break, and that's a good thing, but the catalyst that will move us away from these systems is one that subsumes existing infrastructure while adding new features. You cannot rip and replace our communications networks (or any infrastructure for that matter) and so the only logical solution is to subsume. It's not easy, but that's how this gets fixed.
It's almost absurd the lack of fanfare surrounding AT&Ts proposed phase out of the PSTN in favor of IP networks.
We got number portability and wireless number portability, but the carriers still act as if they own our e.164 addresses and make the transfers arbitrarily difficult. We use phone numbers of SMS, but really we use individual address books, stored in devices, or synchronized with central repositories. We use names to identify people and have to work hard to ensure that our address books are not filled up with duplicates created because we used a one-off email address, or phone number and the phone wasn't able to merge it with an existing contact automatically. We have identity providers that can only represent a small portion of our identity, real names on Facebook and Google+, but cannot resolve that back to our phone numbers or find the best way to contact us at any given time. Presence, which was the real promise of IM and XMPP (and SIMPLE if you must) is not integrated. I cannot determine before hand whether somebody is available to talk on the phone, would prefer a text message, or if I should leave a push voice message they can listen to at their leisure.
Even calling a company with a well designed IVR is still a confusing waste of time, when the device I am calling that system from is smart enough to contain any identifier or proof of identity that the called party would need, the protocols are artificially limited to phone numbers as identifiers. There is also no out of band solution to this problem, or the the problem of selecting what department I would prefer to speak with about a problem without navigating a menu that the interface on my device is not really designed to use. Think DTMF on an Android device where the screen shuts off.
Um. I'm not the one who made iMessage - you need to look at the guys making locked down messaging systems for the user-hostile actions causing problems like these and no doubt much more in the future. If I could help these people out and give them a script to run to fix their problem I would - but of course I can't, because everything is locked down by others who are putting their own vendor lock-in above user satisfaction. And I agree that it is the biggest problem in our industry.
It is the biggest problem, it's just hard to see. Let's assume iMessage was OSS and freely uninstallable/re-installable on iOS devices. This would mean that an iMessage fork could be created that was able to talk to additional services and not only Apple ones. This would be done quickly as iOS users would want to use iMessage to talk to Android users also. The iMessage client itself would be duplicated for Android quickly as well if it was OSS.
As most users would prefer the Android compatible version, the forked version would likely be installed by most users as most users would want to talk to Android. This problem would then be easily fixed: someone could just submit a pull request for a fix for this issue and create a way to easily stop receiving messages through iMessage. Even better, the author would not need to stop using iMessage - he could keep using it and receiving messages on Android.
Ultimately removing the lock-in at the client level forces the problem to auto correct itself across the board by allowing users the option of migration and developers the option of improvement.
Thinking about it further, I don't even think it's appropriate to call this "lock-in".
I very much doubt the Apple engineers who wrote iMessage were rubbing their hands together in maniacal glee, at the prospect of being able to prevent people from ever migrating away from iOS, if they but used the phone number in this specific way.
It sounds like it's exactly what TFA's author assumes: a bug.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is distinguishable from malice.
Apple has certain well advertised priorities. Interoperability with non-Apple systems is not one of them.
(Not to blame Apple in particular -- non-intropability is coincidentally a common feature among the biggest player in every industry, while interopability is a key feature of challengers. But it's just a "bug"... )
Does it change much to focus on the original intention of the engineers?
If the bug ever surfaced or was ever thought of by anyone at Apple at any point in the development process of iMessage, Apple will have effectively accepted to lock the user in by not having it fixed or communicate about it in some way.
The OP must not be the first to report the problem either (he switched after iOS7, iMesssage was more almost two years old by then) ?
This might not be an issue Apple cares in any way, and that's fine for them. We should just recognize their shitty behavior, even if it's originally accidental.
Try switching companies and see how well it works. I have no idea what the actual porting process involves, but then neither did the 2 big telecoms I was dealing with. I had weeks of carrying 2 phones. One received calls, the other SMS. And the telecoms sat there blaming each other. Vodafone and Telecom. New Zealand.
I've gone through number ports in the US three times (seven if you count each number separately) without a single problem. Each was completed within several hours, and dual service time was somewhere between minimal and non-existent (suddenly the old phone stopped and the new phone started). This is in line with what I've heard from friends and relatives, too.
I've read some porting horror stories online over the years. Yours is probably something like the 6th or 7th. I assume things do sometimes break, but it doesn't seem to be particularly frequent, considering millions of people switch carriers every year.
It breaks surprisingly commonly. You've moved 3-7 times in a few years. I move different customers numbers at many times a month. Around 20% of the time we have issues with fail to fast busy for 8 to 12 hours where no system on the telco side takes a call.
I will say this though, switching mobile goes rather well almost all of the time. Porting numbers on fixed telephone lines is much more apt to fail.
If other peoples' misfortunes are influential in keeping others from making bad decisions that have an effect on us all, then yes.
Even the 'good' behavior in this case is awful. Why would a text message fallback to MMS rather than SMS? I'm pretty sure it's because Apple wants non-iPhone users to think of their phones as broken.
>Just think, if you hadn't used a proprietary messaging solution as your default contact method, you'd be able to easily control how you receive the messages.
He would also have lost other benefits, such as convenience, automatically using data instead over SMS for casual chatting, using the method he damn wanted, etc.
What having a problem like this justifies is FIXING the problem, not not using the technology in the first place or some ideas about proprietary and OSS.
Not to mention those are beside the point. Even if he DID use a proprietary messaging solution, he might very well have the same issue. It's not an issue that stems from being proprietary, it's an issue that stems from a stupid caching implementation. If some FOSS mobile chating app had the same bug, he would have been bitten by it just the same.
Depends on what you want to do. I admit I didn't know what iMessage was capable of, but the basic features (text, images) are also possible with XMPP. The more complicated ones is a mixture of "the ISPs don't allow that" (I'm thinking accepting inbound connections), "the user needs 3rd party support" (I'm thinking about needing a proxy server for transfers, which most people don't have, but Apple can conveniently proxy transfer through its own servers) and "just do it".
The problem with XMPP (or any IM protocol for that matter) is that if nobody uses it, there will be little technical progress, which means few people will use it, etc...
Email? Really, now that everyone has email on their phones, why bother with SMS or these SMS-like systems? Email is more reliable, more flexible, and seems to be just as fast in practice.
The smallest email in my inbox right now has 913 bytes of headers and 132 bytes of content. Between the various hops, including through a spam filter, it took 13 seconds just to land on my server. It was then an additional 0 to 300 seconds before each of my devices knew it existed, because push remains black magic when dealing with clients and servers from different authors/companies.
This is not comparable to the normal performance of SMS or iMessages.
Except there is no email app that I know of that presents conversations in way that is as easily readable as line, messenger, etc. I wouldn't want that either as the current presentation is perfect for large amounts of information that I get in my other emails.
The reason iMessage works well is because it's integrated tightly into the OS. So for an open-source alternative to be competitive, it would have to run on... an open mobile OS, which would in turn require open hardware.
Heh? Have you tried solutions like Whatsapp, GroupMe, or Viber? They all work absolutely fine on both big mobile OSes, regardless of hardware.
I don't see the need for absolutely open hardware for an alternative messaging system. Sure, they aren't FLOSS solutions, but they are much less closed than iMessage and are cross-platform.
Fine, but Viber does, right? There are open source, secure messaging systems on the way too. My point was that you do not need open hardware to have a relatively open messaging system. Just look at IRC as an example. It might be somewhat dead now, but it certainly runs on everything now.
Sure, you can use proprietary hardware (iPhone) and try to make it run different software, but your luck getting around their protection systems may vary (and it may or may not be illegal, depending on how much you care).
Curious: has this even been tried? I would assume Apple SoC's require binary drivers, so even though they are similar to Android phones on a hardware level it might be difficult or impossible to even get an Android port to boot.
Hell, it can be difficult to get an unsupported version of Android to work without major bugs on an Android phone.
Important to point out: the authors of iDroid stopped, but not due to any technical obstacle; it was mainly because iDroid was a hobbyist project and their lives intervened. Someone else could pick up the effort today, if they wanted.
However even if someone picked the project up again it wouldn't run on any modern devices, since the last iPhone to have an untethered bootrom exploit was the 3GS.
The whole problem is that no one tries to use iMessage, the texts just get automatically converted and sent over that system when you are both on apple devices.
I was a huge apple fan when they were the underdog, but they are getting a little too big now. iO$ is still the best target operating system for developers, I just wish I didn't like apple's products so much.
Is the free software alternative you talk about hypothetical or do you have any concrete piece of software to refer to, preferably one that would interoperate with OP's peer group of 99% iOS users?
This has been happening for over 2 years now. I've met multiple people in real life (including total non-techies) that have run into this. It's more common than you'd think. Basically anyone moving from an iPhone to Android (or any other phone I assume) will have this problem.
At this point, it's obvious Apple is ok with this. It's a giant "fuck you" to anyone moving away from them and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth knowing they do this purposely.
That's incredibly presumptuous of you to claim Apple is doing this purposely. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's a non-trivial fix for Apple, and that there's simply no good incentive for them to prioritize fixing this over the myriad other things their engineers could be spending their time on.
That's incredibly presumptuous of you to claim Apple is doing this purposely. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's a non-trivial fix for Apple,
Obviously it's a non-trivial fix when they engineered their system on the assumption that nobody should ever leave the iPlatform.
It might be a "stretch", but you could say designing your system in such a way that there's no clean way to leave is intentionally making it hard to leave. Or would that make you a lunatic?
Seriously though. Almost every ex-iPhone user I meet thinks SMS is broken on Android, because other iPhone-users (like wifes) no longer is able to message them. And I'm pretty sure Apple is 100% OK with that.
Based on the "2 years" anecdote above, maybe it's something they could have got around to while completely revamping iOS. There are about few primary moving parts and OP indicates it's a known issue that can be resolved on clients. Too bad Apple has no control over that client OS, right?
It's not a big problem to deal with. There is no motivation to fix it. It's not that Apple is doing anything purposefully. It's that they aren't, and won't, do anything to help since they know that OP (and that ilk) are not their customers. If OP didn't want to "lose" all his friends/network, he would have just got a 5s and shut up.
> there's simply no good incentive for them to prioritize fixing this
There's plenty of incentive for them to fix this. OP is far from the only one calling Apple customer support or going to a Genius bar over this issue. Those costs add up, unless they're also considering the incentives on the other side of the ledger.
Apparently it doesn't have much priority on their list considering the problem has been around for two years. If you think about how fast the mobile landscape has changed, this is no excuse for Apple
Fixing it is the right thing to do. They're seriously screwing with people's communications otherwise. If you're saying that they're avoiding the right thing because it's too hard and there's no incentive, then to me that is essentially saying that they are doing it on purpose.
Preventative step: set your outbound iMessage "caller id" to your email address instead of your phone number. Do this now, before you're bitten by the bug. (Apple's degraded QA as of late on iOS means you'll also have to change it back on ALL your devices on the account any time you add or remove any devices or numbers to iMessage or FaceTime on that Apple ID, too.)
This way, all your contacts are iMessaging with your email address, not your phone number. It means it will keep working when you travel internationally and switch SIM cards, and it means you can disable it easily via your Apple ID should you ditch the iPhone.
In the US phone numbers are much more open than any other means of identifying someone you want to contact.
"non-free" is a bizarre thing to say in this context. No identifier is going to be free as in speech - that would defeat the purpose. If you want to have assurance that you can keep the identifier it had better not be free as in beer either - the provider of the identifier could revoke it at any time.
Some sort of government-issued communications identifier might provide the needed benefits, but actually the phone number is the best solution to the problem that we have.
If you're relying on an email address, you're in much shakier territory. (Unless you own your own domain and email hosting solution, and unless you're a multinational corporation it's likely to be less reliable than other options.)
I'm pretty sure it's quite possible and easy to create an email address, be it from gmail or another email provider.
That email address will be valid and accessible as long as you have internet access. You can travel, use Wi-Fi or cellular data, and it will work.
You can create a new email address for free.
In that context, getting a phone number is much more limited and not free (you need to pay for a voice plan, etc.). And your ability to use said number from other countries (roaming) is limited and expensive.
>No identifier is going to be free as in speech - that would defeat the purpose.
I would say that a public key would work well as a free as in speech identifier. It uniquely identifies an address-holder, and the full software necessary to send messages using that key can be obtained and held on one's own. The problem comes when expecting an identifier to be associated with a person, since there you need a trusted authority to relate between names and keys.
A data-only plan still has a carrier-provided phone number, and it will still default to that phone number when sending iMessages, happily ignorant of the fact that it can't call or text or MMS.
You're talking about invisible implementation details.
My iMessage/FaceTime are set to use an email as the only ID. No one else knows or uses my data-only phone number. Just like they don't know or use my IMEI number.
What is a "phone"? Is it a device with a rotary dial? Or is a device capable of making voice/video calls. A cellular iPad mini, IMO, is simply a mobile iOS device with a 7.9" screen. It can make/receive calls similarly to the 4" screen iOS device (think FaceTime audio, Skype, VoIP, etc.).
That would mean that others will see incoming iMessages from your email address rather than phone number from that point forward, and anyone who doesn't have your email address in their address book will not know who it's from.
I often exchange iMessages with people whose contact entry for me likely consists of phone number & name, and if I'm lucky, a photo.
[Edit] Just realized it also means that people who have both your iMessage-enabled email address and phone number in your contact info will be prompted on whether to send the iMessage to your phone number or email when composing a group message, and many will likely continue to select phone. Apple just needs to add the ability to disassociate your phone number with iMessage, and have clients check that status and update their local configuration when composing or sending iMessages. [/Edit]
This is true. Though getting an iMessage from john.doe@gmail.com who isn't in your contacts isn't as uninformative as getting an iMessage from +1-234-567-8900.
If you're iMessaging them, they either know that 1-234-567-8900 is John Doe, or chances are good that the content of the message is "Hey, this is John Doe, got a new number."
Touché. Though I suspect it might be prudent to further explain that that means they need to add your email address to your contact, as their mind will be blown at that point.
This would work except you lose the ability to fall back to a text message. The way that iMessage is set up, if someone sends and iMessage to your phone and it doesn't get delivered for some reason, say you don't have data coverage where you are, then the Messages app will try to send a text message instead. If you have the same scenario where you are messaging an email address, there is no such fall back.
Disabling an Apple ID would also disable its use in the online Apple Store and the OS X App Store, though. Seems that you might as well just disable iMessage. It's not like it provides that much added value over text messages.
Depends on your particular plan (unlimited text vs. sufficient data), access to Wi-Fi, and how frequently your friends send images or media over iMessage. I have a friend who turned of iMessage to reduce data usage.
Some "bugs" are only fixed with class action lawsuits. This "bug" has been around for a while now and Apple can fix it they just don't prioritize bugs that allow people to switch away from them easily.
It is fraud to fail to deliver messages to my phone when I've switched phones. It shouldn't take me calling you, it should happen automatically and in under a day.
I know a ton of people who have this problem, it's a huge issue. My mom recently switched to a Moto X and couldn't get any text messages from my sisters. When she called Apple for support, they told her they would not help her unless she paid a fee for phone support. Read that again: they wanted her to pay extra money to properly leave their ecosystem. If they wanted her to come back to Apple it backfired, she'll never touch another iDevice after that snub.
1) Turning off iMessage on old iPhone
2) Removing phone number from my Apple account
3) Friends removing my cell # from their address books
and a few other random things. Nothing has fixed it. The only way a friend with an iOS device can SMS me is if they turn of iMessage. This is a pretty huge bug on Apple's part.
From Apple's perspective, it sounds like quite a handy bug. Since I've been an iPhone user for 5 years, this bug makes me locked in to the iOS environment.
Given that they have established a market-distorting barrier to exit, they should be ordered by a court to fix this issue.
Did you unregister your device(s)? After doing this I think people's iPhones know your number isn't an iPhone anymore and after it fails to send the iMessage it sends it as a regular message. The below link helped me:
That's odd. I made the same switch, but when I turned off iMessage on my old phone, texts from contacts with iPhones are sent correctly to my new android device.
Same problem here and I know quite a few people who've had these issues as well.
iMessage is a huge mess - even if you're still using your iPhone. Back in December, when I was still on iPhone, I went in a month-long trip abroad. Since data roaming still costs a fortune, I had data switched off most of the time. I'd just connect on wifi whenever possible and occasionally switched on the data connection when I really needed to get online while on the go.
Yet, despite the fact that I was roaming and that I had my data connection switched off, most of the text messages that my iOS-using contacts sent me were sent via iMessage instead of plain SMS. Which meant that I'd only get their message when I went back online, hours and sometimes days later.
I know of a relationship that ended because of iMessages. They had had a fight and he texted her to apologize and then he never received any responses (they went straight to his computer) and then she got more upset, he thought she wasn't talking to him, etc.
The type of message sent should not matter at all. (I realize that's not what you're saying.)
And people have their own individual and transient needs. If a text message makes it easier to say you're sorry, then there's nothing wrong with it. Particular if that's already an accepted and normal way to communicate between the parties.
The problem wasn't that he sent it by text, the problem was that the relationship was too weak to withstand N hours of no communication. It was going to break anyway.
Haha, yeah it wasn't exactly mean to last, but this didn't help matters. Hey, you could even say iMessages helped them do the right thing. Good guy iMessages.
I had exactly the same issue on holiday last year. When out and about I wouldn't see any messages and then as soon as I got back to wifi they'd all come through.
Just another of the many apple straws that have been breaking the camel's back for me recently. The fact that it could haunt me even after I completely leave their platform is truly disturbing.
I feel that this issue needs a lot of noise. Bug or not it should be filed under non-competitive behaviour.
My wife recently got an iPhone so we now both have one. We have tried everything we can possibly think of, but we cannot send each other iMessages, only SMS.
Ah, this sounds familiar. I recently got a new cell phone number, using an Android phone. Some days later, a few of my fellow carpoolers told me after texting me that they were getting replies from someone else telling them they had the wrong number! I was stumped, until we noticed all the people who were failing to text me were using iPhones.
I texted my own number using one of their phones and asked the mystery recipient if she recognized my phone number. Apparently, it was her old number: still attached to her iMessage account. She removed it, but weeks later, I still don't receive any texts from iPhone users. Guess I'll have to check in with AT&T/Apple about it.
tl;dr: This bug can affect you even if you have never owned an iPhone.
This seems a big issue then - permanently caching phone numbers is dangerous; around here some 55% users are on prepaid simcards, and thoae numbers often get recycled, i.e., given out to someone else after it stops being used and teen-25 audiences tend to churn through many numbers (no idea on why they do so, i've had a single number forever, but that's how it is)
A few years earlier almost all of them wouldn't be on iOS, but now they are often using iPhones (sometimes old handmedowns) on those disposable numbers, so if it breaks messaging when changing numbers... Then that will be a problem for many people.
Exact. Same. Issue. All their solutions do not work. I've reset Apple ID and wiped all my old iOS devices. Roughly 90% of my friends cannot text me anymore.
What's comical about this is how easy it is to fix: have a cache that breaks weekly; upon new text message, ping Apple HQ and see if device is iOS and has iMessage installed; great, save for a week.
You can do better than that. User marks iMessage account as 'inactive'. Next time someone tries to send to his address via iMessage, ping their client with an "invalidate-cache-and-send-as-SMS" status code, and it's done. Everything is handled transparently to the sending user.
No matter what, it would require some sort of update.
Yup. Tried resetting everything possible. So did Apple support. And they escalated to engineers who also said they have no more records of my number server-side.
But there's no way to clear the client side caches.
That sucks, if it is the case. It only takes a second or two for a newly added number to switch from green to blue (I'm sure it's some kind of HTTP number lookup request to an *.apple.com web service), so why couldn't they re-request that every time - or at least keep the caches down to like 15-30 minutes...
I believe you're missing ac29's point. Android allows applications to distinguish between cached data and "regular/permanent" data. It also allows users to clear them separately.
Logically, the Apple ID / phone number mapping seems like it should fall under cached data (e.g. it can be regenerated and does need to be re-checked from time to time). If the iOS Messaging app properly implemented this distinction, users (or Apple) could clear this cached mapping without touching anyone's message history. Sadly, it sounds like it hasn't been implemented that way, so...
I had a similar issue this weekend. Once I changed my Apple ID password I started to receive SMS messages from people with iOS devices. I had to re-authorize all Apple services on my other devices and machines.
It works -- Also, make sure if you have an iPad or you're using your Apple ID with Messages on Mac OS X that you sign out of everything beforehand. Last resort is changing your password but it works.
The same thing happened to me when I broke my iPhone a few months back. I ended up speaking to 3 or 4 different representatives explaining that I had removed the phone number from all my iDevices, but couldn't turn iMessages off from the device. I went so far as borrowing a friend's phone, and getting a new phone number associated with my Apple account. The solution that ended up working for me was changing the password associated with my Apple account.
I don't understand why Apple doesn't have a solution to this yet. It was obviously going to be a problem from the start.
The people I feel worst for are those who get a phone number that used to belong to an iPhone user. They may miss texts without any idea what is going on, and without any recourse to fix it.
https://appleid.apple.com
Try going here and removing the phone number from the "Phone Numbers" section.
I still have friends who try to message me and their iOS assumes I'm using iMessage. The "retry as SMS" feature is the only method that works.
Also make sure to tell them "Send as SMS" is enabled on their iMessage settings. This will automatically try to re-send it as a text without manual intervention.
Changing your number should not be the solution to this problem. I recently switched from iOS to Android and have been experiencing the same issues. The OP's title says it best, "IOS holding my phone number hostage." Changing my number would require an incredible amount of inconvenience. Apple needs to address this immediately.
I had this same problem and recently solved it by
- putting my sim back into my old iOS phone.
- reactivating iMessage on the old phone WITH the sim inside of the old phone
- wait to make sure the phone fully registers with iMessage servers
- deactivate iMessage WITH the sim inside the phone
After following these steps, I'm not problem free. I had tried many times before to reactivate/deactivate iMessage, but never with the sim back in the device.
I recently made exactly ths same switch, and unsurprisingly had exactly this issue. I resolved it by turning on my iPhone, putting it in airplane mode, and turning on wireless.
I then went into Settings >> Messages and turned off iMessage. All the iPhones that had previously been trying to send me messages via iMessage then started routing messages to me via text.
The saddest part about this story is perhaps the fact that iMessage was supposed to be open and allow other phone builders to use it. Having it truly cross-platform in the first place would have avoided a situation like this :(
Facetime was supposed to become an open standard†, but I don't think Apple ever said that about imessage.
† From the WWDC 2010 keynote: “And we're going to take it all the way. We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make Facetime an open industry standard.”
Did you try putting your SIM card back into your iPhone, then going to Settings > Messages and turning off iMessage over there? Make sure you have an internet connection too so it can "broadcast" your new status to Apple HQ. This is what I do when I'm abroad and don't want to dataroam. It's possible you already tried that and it won't make a difference - I don't use group messaging a lot.
This would also work if a friend lent him their phone.
Of course, he'd have to do a backup > wipe > setup phone with his iCloud account & SIM > change settings > wipe > restore from backup... but, honestly, this is the process I had to do and it took about 5-10 mins tops.
I had this same exact problem, and this was by far the easiest solution. Just need to have a friend willing to you let you manhandle their phone for a little while.
Yeah, all that OP has to do is go into the settings on the iPhone and either unlink the phone number or disable iMessage entirely and it'll go back to normal. It just required some forethought other than simply wiping the phone. I don't understand what the issue is; the feature is there so that you can be iMessaged if your phone happens to be turned off for a few days.
If the phone number was de-linked immediately what would the use in that be? It expires after 10 days, anyway.
The same thing happened to my Mom when she switched to Android this past Christmas. The solution in that case was to get her to connect her old iPhone to the Internet via Wi-Fi, and then disable iMessages.
I assume that you would need to disable iMessages on all your iDevices in order to remedy the problem.
Wouldn't it work to lend an iPhone, turn it on with the SIM holding the number and then switch off iMessages there? Wouldn't this invalidate the cached account in other iPhones?
I don't see how the group MMS show that this wouldn't work - the question is whether cached accounts get purged through this client action, both on server and peers.
I know it's annoying but the best solution here just seems to change your number. Don't lose your mind over this one.
edit : seems like people don't understand my post. If you have a voice, the good thing to do is to make a blog post and submit it to websites like HN. The guy did it, now what can he do if he needs a quick fix? If he's in rush? Change number. It's really not that terrible and I do it every year without trouble.
Yes, asking everyone to use a new number is less work than asking people to delete all their imessage threads. Updating contact info at work and with services shifts the burden to him.
I don't get if your comment is sarcastic or not. If it is, I don't see why it would be such a huge problem. It's a quickfix and if I were him, and in a rush to fix the problem, I would do that. I'm personally changing my phone number every year and it's never been a burden.
It wasn't sarcastic I was agreeing with you. I guess other people thought I was being sarcastic too because you got downvoted and I didn't. I don't know, seems kind of obvious. I use google voice, I never have to change my number when switching phones. I don't know how that would impact imessage. I wouldn't ever use such a service baked into the phone by the phone maker.
While one might lose their email losing a phone number is way way harder.
I'm not sure how it works in US but in Finland you have guaranteed transferring across operators. Guaranteed as in fines will tick if the operator from which the number is transferred away is having some 'problems'. Not surprisingly those kind of problems are almost nonexistent.
if he doesn't have the same friends it's not a problem. I mean, he wrote that blog post, posted on HN and on various websites. It's getting attention. It's good. Now the guy still has to fix it so he can still contact his friends.
I'm currently having to deal with this too. The best solution that I found was switching my number and keeping the iPhone, jailbreaking it, and installing BiteSMS with forwarding.
It's kinda a pain and of course I have to pay to keep the iPhone around.
Rather than telling your friends to delete their entire history, what's the problem with asking them to just make a new contact listing? I'm not familiar with the gubbins of iMessage.
I think the problem is that asking everyone that's ever messaged you from an iOS device to modify something on their handset every time someone in their contacts switches platforms isn't a reasonable request.
I too switched to Android after Apple released iOS7 and have been having similar issues. The only solution I've found so far that still doesn't fix 100% of the problems is by asking friends and relatives to log out of iMessage, restart their phone then log back in.
Solution wise, even if iOS devs created a fix to purge the cache older than X weeks and to recechk it would still require all your friends to install the update before it takes affect, so I don't even see a fully fixed and timely solution to this.
I've had similar problems when switching between Android & iOS devices over the years with both T-Mobile and AT&T. It was a bit perplexing the first couple times it happened. Then I got used to the drill.
The solution, at least in my situation, was to call the carrier. Apple wasn't at fault.
Both T-Mobile and AT&T would fail to complete all steps required for the transfer, and therefore still showed the old device as the active one. A simple call resolved the issue.
In a couple instances, AT&T & T-Mobile would resolve the issue. Then I'd see the same behavior again weeks later. Sure enough, they had reverted to the old device on my profile. Calling them again resolved the issue.
For those who want to extol the virtues of FSF, do note the following:
1) GSM is neither free(both in free beer and free to distribute) nor open-source
2) The phone that you are using, no matter how 'free' the software are, the hardware are mostly proprietary and those manufacturers aren't very FSF friendly (now getting better, but still way to go)
3) Phone manufacturers tend to add proprietary drivers/apps on top of Android, which renders the whole system not 100% free software either, so by saying iOS is closed-source, it is kind of like pot calling kettle black.
This is a serious problem and I'm gonna let him finish, but I get a huge amount of schadenfreude from hearing about the suffering of someone who sends a lot of group MMSes.
My daughter had a similar problem. She has no data plan on her iPhone and she found that texts from some friends seemed to be delayed. Messages were not being sent/received until she connected to Wi-Fi.
To fix, her friends who previously used iMessage to reach her had to start a new SMS conversation (or turn off iMessage entirely). If her friends just continued the conversations that started via iMessage, she could not get them via SMS.
What's worse is that Apple iMessage servers seem to cache your phone number for a long time too... Even new message threads from my friends were trying to send as iMessage, even long after I got rid of my iPhone, disabled iMessage everywhere, and deleted any association of my phone number I could find. (I too switched from iOS to Android.) I find this crazy, that Apple lock you in like that.
Also, the default messaging app in Android may or may not be helpful. I've found Ninja to be the better way to go when dealing with SMS with the Apple folks yet to leave iOS.
I've noticed lately that texts to people switching from iPhone to Android will fail and require user interaction.
When did this change? I recall texting a friend a couple years back, and it automatically failed over to SMS. I remember this explicitly because I was in Mexico at the time, and it led to a few extra bucks in special charges for texting in a foreign country.
I had this same problem and the best case fix seems to be to reset your Apple ID password; this forces you to log out from all devices, and so iMessage will at least error out for people who try and text you. But their devices will never go back to normal texts unless they specifically force it too, and that kind of lock-in is utter bullshit.
Nice fix. I hate changing this password as the everything needs updating. Appletv, App Store (on 3 macs iphone and iPad) iTunes (2 macs iphone and iPad for music) home sharing (on everything) iMessage (Mac and iphone), FaceTime (Mac, iphone, iPad), developer portal (Mac), itunes connect (Mac), email (Mac, iphone, iPad) and iCloud backups on everything. It is hellish and invariably something is missed so the bugs aren't ironed out for weeks. Don't change your passwords as Appleland becomes a dark and hellish place.
I had a friend who went through this same issue, for about a week i wondered why he never replied to me, until we talked about it and i realized the situation he was in. It's a terrible bug, apple seriously need to address this.
I get why they wouldnt want to, but to me this is a shady as a broken "Unsubscribe from this email" link.
Turning off iMessage on her iPhone, making sure any references to iMessage in any device settings (including OSX) related only to an email address not a cell number before moving to Android meant my girlfriend didn't experience any issues. Not sure if that's a panacea and she was just lucky though ..
Had the same thing happen to me with a friend (me on iOS, him on iOS->Android) - it seemed to me that the trick was to press 'Send as Text Message' when the message fails to deliver. From then, it seems to work fine, as that probably forces a check on the Apple ID validity.
I had the same issue, and after isolating the problem to iOS clients like the author did, I had some success by having iMessage users remove and re-add me as a contact. Obviously not a good general solution, but it's better than having them delete every message chain.
A fairly simple solution would be to get a Google Voice number, that would forward to your real number - and have people text you via Google Voice. However, if anybody calls (or sends an old-style SMS to) your old number, it would still come through.
I'm having what I think is the same problem just from getting my broken iPhone 5 replaced with a new one. Same deal with tech support - very nice, but not able to solve the problem. Sounds like a bug in iOS that could seriously stand fixing.
Same thing happened to me when I switched to Windows Phone. I didn't realize it until my iPhone was long gone. I un-registered my iPhone on Apple's site and about a month later, iPhone users could text me again.
This is worrying as my Mum's iPhone just bit the dust and we replaced it with an Android phone. I'm hoping that she doesn't experience the same issues with her friends and family (many of whom use iPhones).
When I upgraded to Android 4.3 I believe Google asked if I wanted to route my messages through Hangouts (Google+). I assume this would send everything through Gchat/Google+ wherever possible and skip SMS...
When I was on IOS I regularly turned off imessage and back on again to refresh contacts. It's a pain in the ass, but it helped ease the pain of my friends switching to android before I did.
Not always, even when 'send as
SMS when iMessage is unavailable' is turned on. Fixing iMessage issues is near impossible due to the complete absence of useful settings.
The fucked up thing is that is actually benefits Apple. The economic value of your subscribers it approximately the number of subscribers times the switching cost. This bug raises the switching cost and therefore makes their customers more valuable.
You should seriously improve your blog’s contrast, especially regarding small text. The background is around #F5F1F8 while the text is #888588 (which is not enough to meet WC3 recommendations).
Nevermind the fact that iMessage existed long before SJ passed on and that this issue has been present since then. Just cut off those rough edges to cram it into your narrative.
This is a such wrong reply. The OP did not complain about his message history, he was talking about message histories of all his friends and relatives. Do you really think it could be socially acceptable to approach each of your friends and relative and tell them: "If message histories are your only copy of family/friends photos, you're doing it wrong." ?
I don't even think it is acceptable to approach each of your friends and relatives and pester them with some technical issue that shouldn't exist in the first place. The proposed fix just isn't a viable solution.
This is true, but on the flipside it's hardly Apple's fault if the only copy they have of highly important and sentimental photos is a cached messaging stream. There are countless ways to back up that data. It's like blaming Microsoft because you didn't save transferred files during a Skype session. Once they're on you're end, they're your problem. Apple's job is to send them and make sure they arrive, that's it.
This bug sucks and Apple's solution isn't a good one, but that rebuttal is equally weak. Use PhoneDisk, PhoneView or one of the other methods to pull a text messaging history if it's that important to you and then blow it away.
I wasn't even commenting regarding the stuck number, which is clearly an issue. I was arguing that this:
"the vast majority of messaging I’ve done in the past 3 years are group messages with pictures of our children."
It just screams data loss to ruin your day. I was (kinda) hoping OP would see that and maybe rethink his storage plans, because otherwise he'll be posting "wahh my photos weren't backed up" soon enough.
