Apple releases fix for broken iMessage SMS messages

[Bateluer]

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/09/apple-solves-missing-text-message/

If you're still being plagued by missing text messages after leaving iOS for another platform, then the time has come to rejoice. Apple has quietly launched a tool that will let you deregister your phone number from iMessage and solve your texting problem once and for all. The root of this mess comes from the fact that Apple roots all your SMS through its iMessage system -- even after a user switched to a different phone. The result was texts from iPhone users disappearing into the ether. If you forgot to disable iMessage before switching devices, often the only solution was to completely disconnect the device from your Apple account. Now all you have to do is plug your phone number into Apple's deregistration site, and punch in the verification code sent to you.

Now, we see how successful this is. People were still having issues with the flustercluck that was the original process, where every store rep and Apple CSR were telling customers different things.

 

[zerogear]

About freaking time. It really shouldn't have been as hard as they made it.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I'm glad they now have a way to opt out (took long enough!), but honestly I think this whole issue highlights the problem with integration of services.

The way I see this is if you currently have an email thread going on between your friends and your email gets hacked (lets say Gmail) and you switch to Yahoo Mail, how do your friends know that your e-mail changed? You give them your new email address and you make sure people don't keep hitting Reply All to your old email address, and someone goes to correct that e-mail thread.

Furthermore, the key is that you give out your email address. If someone has your contact stored in their Address Book, they can't just keep tying John Appleseed unless they update the contact's email address from the old to the new.

The key difference here is that outside of Corporate Exchange and crap, we still heavily rely on email addresses, while on phones, we just associate phone #s with contacts.

I can see that Apple's certainly at fault for not setting up a simple opt-out method, although its notable that there was a way to do it so long as you didn't lose your iPhone. You could disable iMessage from an iPhone prior to switching, but similar to the problem before with e-mail addresses, if you are in a thread with you as an iMessage recipient, you likely will continue to run into issues. At this point, its honestly NOT Apple's fault anymore, but at the same time, asking them to do more would be asking your email provider to automatically update an email thread to correct email addresses.

Expecting a thread to continue properly shows the trickiness and intricacies of integrating mobile chat and text messages. Honestly, different communication methods need to have separate apps or distinct methods to separate them.

 

[Eug]

Thanks Apple. It's only 3 years overdue.

However, I still refuse to use iMessage, because it hijacks SMS messaging. Now that we've seen all the problems associated with this poorly implemented integration, it is clear now (and three years ago) that iOS should have an option to keep SMS and iMessage functionality separate.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Does it clearly hijack SMS messaging though? I believe the app checks if the phone # is an iMessage user and then it will send your message as an iMessage instead of an SMS. It doesn't take your SMS from the carrier and then convert it. The SMS is never sent (otherwise it would count against your quota).

The tricky issue is that even if you're allowed to register and de-register now, how do you deal with existing conversations? Is Apple supposed to automatically fix text messages? Are they supposed to provide a forwarding service to SMS? Think about this like an email chain. You reply all to an iMessage number that's de-registered. So maybe an iOS user that mass replies can have a system where Apple sees that one of the target numbers in the group is no longer on iMessage, would we want Apple to jump in to suggest creating a new thread?

But what about Android users? I've never seen it clearly explained how iMessage works if you have 2 Android users and 3 iMessage users. Does the whole thread just become an MMS? Or is it still an iMessage for the iOS users, but only MMS for Android users? So maybe Apple can fix the target recipient on iOS devices, but what if an Android user replies all to someone who's no longer an iMessage user? What happens? Who's responsibility is it now to make sure the former iMessage user gets the text?

This is why I've emphasized time and time again that integration of Hangouts and SMS is pointless. You either get everyone on Hangouts, or you stay on SMS. Having this automated switch between just invites disaster.

 

[nickbits]

Does it clearly hijack SMS messaging though? I believe the app checks if the phone # is an iMessage user and then it will send your message as an iMessage instead of an SMS. It doesn't take your SMS from the carrier and then convert it. The SMS is never sent (otherwise it would count against your quota).

The tricky issue is that even if you're allowed to register and de-register now, how do you deal with existing conversations? Is Apple supposed to automatically fix text messages? Are they supposed to provide a forwarding service to SMS? Think about this like an email chain. You reply all to an iMessage number that's de-registered. So maybe an iOS user that mass replies can have a system where Apple sees that one of the target numbers in the group is no longer on iMessage, would we want Apple to jump in to suggest creating a new thread?

But what about Android users? I've never seen it clearly explained how iMessage works if you have 2 Android users and 3 iMessage users. Does the whole thread just become an MMS? Or is it still an iMessage for the iOS users, but only MMS for Android users? So maybe Apple can fix the target recipient on iOS devices, but what if an Android user replies all to someone who's no longer an iMessage user? What happens? Who's responsibility is it now to make sure the former iMessage user gets the text?

This is why I've emphasized time and time again that integration of Hangouts and SMS is pointless. You either get everyone on Hangouts, or you stay on SMS. Having this automated switch between just invites disaster.

Conversations can switch to and from iMessage with each message. It does a lookup per message. I frequently have conversations littered with green and blue messages.

 

[TheStu]

But what about Android users? I've never seen it clearly explained how iMessage works if you have 2 Android users and 3 iMessage users. Does the whole thread just become an MMS? Or is it still an iMessage for the iOS users, but only MMS for Android users? So maybe Apple can fix the target recipient on iOS devices, but what if an Android user replies all to someone who's no longer an iMessage user? What happens? Who's responsibility is it now to make sure the former iMessage user gets the text?

If I text multiple people, and ANY of them are not on iMessage, it changes to MMS.

 

[Eug]

The hijacking of SMS/MMS is not consistent, and that's the problem. It's sometimes hard to know what the actual behavior will be. I had a situation with my wife's iPhone 5 where if the recipient had a previous iMessage thread it was actually impossible to send that person an MMS when my wife's phone's iMessage was turned off. If she tried to send a picture, the phone would automatically default to iMessage but wouldn't be able to send it, because the iMessage feature was turned off. It would not fall back to MMS at all. It would just fail. Obviously this was a bug, but nonetheless it was remarkably persistent even after reboots, until I reset all of her network settings on the phone.

By the way, you can answer your phone on an iPad in iOS 8.1 no problem. You cannot use SMS on an iPad unless iMessage is already on, regardless if you want to use iMessage or not. This is another reason why I want SMS and iMessage to be separate.

 

[Eug]

In addition, you may have multiple threads from the same person in your list of message threads, depending on whether the thread was started with the phone number or the email address. If the person no longer has an iPhone and you try to send a message from an iMessage thread they will get nothing. Sometimes the message will fail, but sometimes it actually gets listed as being delivered, even though it wasn't actually delivered.

This is actually the central issue which people switching from iPhone to android phones have on a repeated basis. The iMessage deregistration page is to address this, but I suspect it will work inconsistently, since manual call-in deregistrations in the past also worked in-consistently.

Furthermore, even when the registration deactivation does work, it sometimes takes hours to days to filter through the system.

Basically it seems to me that the developers build iMessage with the idea that if you have an iPhone, you will only ever want to use iMessage for the rest of your life, and the situation where people might actually want to use SMS and or MMS just isn't tested very well.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Conversations can switch to and from iMessage with each message. It does a lookup per message. I frequently have conversations littered with green and blue messages.

Yeah I see that too on my end.

But then how come people say that despite deactivating iMessage prior to switching to Android, they still don't receive messages? Is that user error then?

 

[TheStu]

Yeah I see that too on my end.

But then how come people say that despite deactivating iMessage prior to switching to Android, they still don't receive messages? Is that user error then?

Probably something more like Apple not making it more obvious/easier for users to get out of the service.

 

[Eug]

It's a bug. Or probably a collection of bugs.

Sometimes when you deactivate iMessage, it immediately switches over to normal SMS behaviour. But sometimes it doesn't. Apple has told users that if it doesn't switch over right away, it can sometimes take up to 48 hours.

To me that is completely unacceptable.