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iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

blog.benjaminste.in

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Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#51

Post by owenwil »

benstein wrote: post #40
owenwil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Nope. I still have the iPhone. Everything is unlinked, deactivated, reset, etc in every way possible.

In that case, you seem to have run into a separate bug. This is what worked for me when I switched back to Android. How long have you been waiting?

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#54

Post by jey »

benstein wrote: post #39
0x0 wrote: post #21

This article claims resetting your apple ID password will disassociate the imessage phone number: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5538

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.

So it's clearly a bug or intentional misfeature by Apple.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#55

Post by sandymcm »

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.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#56

Post by badusername »

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.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#57

Post by shurcooL »

sneak wrote: post #43

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 you…

Yes, this is a good idea.

But it's an extension of "stop relying so much on a non-free, proprietary 9-digit number as your id only to be at the mercy of your phone carrier".

Personally, I use a data-only plan and feel much better than when I had a carrier-provided phone number.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#58

Post by maxerickson »

RyanZAG wrote: post #30

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 help…

The problem is that the people sending the messages can't control how they are sent.

The software I'm using can't solve that problem.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#59

Post by shurcooL »

owenwil wrote: post #50
RyanZAG wrote: post #30

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 help…

So, what's an open-source alternative to iMessage that lots of people use?

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.

Re: iOS holding my phone number hostage = the worst bug I’ve ever experienced

#60

Post by wwweston »

sneak wrote: post #35
RyanZAG wrote: post #30

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 help…

> Maybe stuff like this happening is a good thing as it drills home the point Ugh, thinking like this just may well be the biggest problem in our industry. Stop being user-hostile.

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.

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