iMessage purgatory • Hacker News Board

Re: iMessage purgatory

#11

Post by bradfa » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #3

This site has a solution: 1. Reset your Apple ID password and do not log back in on your device(s) 2. Send a text to 48369 with the word STOP It won’t happen immediately but over a 12-hour period, you should start receiving texts on your Android device that are sent from iPhone users. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-keep-receiving-sm...

Official Apple knowledge base info: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5185

Re: iMessage purgatory

#12

Post by Scorpion » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

I briefly switched from an iOS phone to an Nexus 5 and had the same issue. For other reasons, I switched back. A colleague of mine liked the Nexus a lot and made the switch after I did. He has been fighting this for months. Everything works properly for a while. Sometimes, several weeks will go by. Then, out of the blue, my phone tries to send the message to him as an iMessage. It's bizarre and frustrating.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#13

Post by lurien » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:43 PM UTC

It's even worse if you want to keep an iDevice registered for facetime/iMessage use. You can't toggle it on and off on demand.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#14

Post by cek994 » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

I had a very similar problem when I drowned my iPhone and switched my SIM to an old Windows Phone 7 I had lying around. If you have your old phone, you can disable iMessage while the SIM is still in it, which apparently works -- but if you don't, you're basically up a creek. I ended up changing the email address on my iCloud account.

It baffles me that online iCloud doesn't have a dashboard for controlling this. Doesn't seem it should be that hard to unlink phone numbers from iMessage.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#15

Post by joshstrange » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

There was a story posted the HN that was very similar to this semi-recently, in fact I though it was a repost until I saw this was published today. I can't seem to find the previous post, does anyone else remember that/have a link? Thanks!

Re: iMessage purgatory

#16

Post by Scorpion » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

bradfa wrote: post #11

uptown wrote: post #3

This site has a solution: 1. Reset your Apple ID password and do not log back in on your device(s) 2. Send a text to 48369 with the word STOP It won’t happen immediately but over a 12-hour period, you should start receiving texts on your Android device that are sent from iPhone users. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-keep-receiving-sm...

Official Apple knowledge base info: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5185

I think it's important to note that the Apple KB explicitly states that the steps outlined in the parent comment and article do not work.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#17

Post by powdahound » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:46 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #3

This site has a solution: 1. Reset your Apple ID password and do not log back in on your device(s) 2. Send a text to 48369 with the word STOP It won’t happen immediately but over a 12-hour period, you should start receiving texts on your Android device that are sent from iPhone users. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-keep-receiving-sm...

I did all this a few weeks ago but still had to wait a few weeks for my friends' iPhones to realize my number was no longer iMessage enabled. During that time they all had to "Resend as SMS" on their messages to me.

We all ended up on Google Hangouts in the end (the iOS app is nice!)

Re: iMessage purgatory

#18

Post by oalders » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:48 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #9

What is interesting to me always is that my experience trying to send iMessages to people is usually the opposite: if someone's phone runs out of batteries or they start a phone call (on CDMA, which can't do voice and data simultaneously) I nearly instantly am forced to send them text messages. I also have found the "Delivered" notices very reliable: AFAIK they require a device to actually receive the message. Note h…

My sister has an iPhone, but no data plan. So, if she's out and I want to text her from my iPhone, she needs to make sure she doesn't have iMessages running on her computer at home. If it's on, I text her a bunch of times and I just get the blue bubbles. Then I get a bunch of SMS messages from her saying "where are you? why aren't you texting me back" and hilarity ensues. I guess I could just call her.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#19

Post by gonehome » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:50 PM UTC

Even more frustrating, reading this just reminds me how much better the google voice solution to this problem is and it predated iMessage by several years. Google has just let it atrophy - then they introduced hangouts late (relative to other chat apps in the market) and still have not integrated the google voice features or pushed them with android.

Does anyone who works at/worked at Google know why this happened?

Were they trying to turn the telecoms into dumb pipes with the original Nexus and gizmo5 purchase, but when that failed just abandoned the idea? You'd think the success of whatsapp and facebook chat would make chat a priority. If people communicate using your platform they're more likely to use your account for other things.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#20

Post by PhilipA » Tue, May 13, 2014, 7:51 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #15

There was a story posted the HN that was very similar to this semi-recently, in fact I though it was a repost until I saw this was published today. I can't seem to find the previous post, does anyone else remember that/have a link? Thanks!

I submitted this one pretty recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555146