Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

iMessage purgatory

adampash.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 172 posts

Re: iMessage purgatory

#61

Post by mwsherman »

IM and SMS are different ideas. SMS moves a message from one device to another. SMS also knows nothing about the receiving device or whether the message got there.

IM (under which I include iMessage) is user-to-user, not device-to-device. It can know about the recipient and whether messages are received.

Each of these things has advantages.

SMS works because the phone network is always tracking a device. It is very addressable. The receiving device is mobile, rarely changes, and is singular.

IM has a notion of sessions. The user signs off and on. It can travel over any IP connection. The device on which the user is addressable changes a lot. There may be multiple devices, making the definition of “delivered” a bit less deterministic.

Conflating these two makes for a confusing mental model for the user, and for failures like this.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#62

Post by Reich »

jc4p wrote: post #30

I went through this last month when I switched to the Nexus 5, had no clue I wasn't getting messages until someone with an iPhone tweeted at me asking why I as ignoring them. However, all it took from me was a call to Apple's customer service, I told them I had just switched off my iPhone and no longer got texts from people with iMessage and they immediately sent me to a tech that fixed the problem for me. Have you b…

This is the proper response. I feel like the linked post is just a reason to bash Apple. As someone who used to work in their tech support (and has no real feeling about the company good or bad), EVERY time someone calls with this issue, it is fixed with the click of a button that deauthorizes their iMessage token.

I know a lot of people are saying that this shouldn't even have to be a step when you switch phones, but the fact is that you chose to use iMessage for the features. It could have been turned off at any time, they are not forcing you to use it.

It would be great if there was a way to fix this without having to call (or unregister your phone number from your apple id), because of not being able to know that it's happening. But it's not like Apple is deliberately trying to keep your messages hostage. Besides, you've already switched phones.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#63

Post by superuser2 »

unfunco wrote: post #38
MBCook wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not Apple customers anymore. It's not a problem (in that it's not effecting their customers, it IS their fault). The best way to get this fixed would probably be for iPhone users who lose the ability to message their friend to complain to Apple, not the former customer. Sad though. Apple is so good at customer service in many contexts. But sometimes they seem to decide on one of these seemingly purposeful bli…

The people with iPhones are still Apple's customers, and it's their messages that are disappearing. That's a perfectly good case for a CAL. Suppose that someone tried texting someone for medical assistance (silly, I know...), and that message was not delivered because the recipient changed their phone but kept their number, is that the fault of the person that changed their phone or is it the fault of Apple for not b…

>not being able to realise that people might someday want to change devices?

They did realize it. There are two mechanisms for handling this issue - turning off iMessage in Settings before deactivating your iPhone, and calling Apple after deactivating your iPhone. Both are documented.

There is no way for your iPhone to know it's been deactivated and still communicate with Apple. If anything it's the fault of the carriers for not providing Apple with an API hook for "this iPhone was just deactivated."

Also SMS is many times more lossy than iMessage. I've had messages show up to my friends on AT&T several days after they were sent, and not all. SMS messages longer than the length limit almost always arrive out of order, and sometimes parts don't arrive at all. Relying on non-iMessage texting for medical assistance is stupid to begin with.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#64

Post by ccozan »

gonehome wrote: post #19

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? W…

To be honest, Hangouts of Google does a pretty nice job of SMS integration and multidevice communication.

First: if a person has SMS and also a google account, they are just put toghether under the same hood, but they don't get mixed, just get sorted. An SMS goes associated with the number so I would not receive a SMS as a talk message or what ever. Second: if I am getting a message ( over Gtalk or Hangouts ) all my devices ( including Chrome) are receiving it in the same (relative) time. No stealing around, all my conversations are sync'd everywhere.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#65

Post by softinio »

I've been having the same issue and it ruined part of my vacation as people I was meeting up with on vacation thought I was ignoring their texts and we never met up.

What adds insult to injury is that all ios devices are shipped by default with the setting set to not send by sms when user not found on iMessage.

Apple should own up to this problem publicly and compensate users.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#66

Post by kennywinker »

headShrinker wrote: post #51

> save the green vs. blue bubbles, which are in their own way a sort of weird social/status indicator Save your opinionated anti Apple rhetoric. The color coded indicator allows people to know which features are included in the service, or whether your text was delivered and read or in your case, not delivered...

While color coding totally serves a useful purpose, it's also DEFINITELY used by some as a indicator of status or inclusion in a group. People are super tribal, and will use any indicators available to indicate inclusion or exclusion.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#67

Post by jc4p »

Reich wrote: post #62
jc4p wrote: post #30

I went through this last month when I switched to the Nexus 5, had no clue I wasn't getting messages until someone with an iPhone tweeted at me asking why I as ignoring them. However, all it took from me was a call to Apple's customer service, I told them I had just switched off my iPhone and no longer got texts from people with iMessage and they immediately sent me to a tech that fixed the problem for me. Have you b…

This is the proper response. I feel like the linked post is just a reason to bash Apple. As someone who used to work in their tech support (and has no real feeling about the company good or bad), EVERY time someone calls with this issue, it is fixed with the click of a button that deauthorizes their iMessage token. I know a lot of people are saying that this shouldn't even have to be a step when you switch phones, bu…

I wouldn't be so quick to say it's just an excuse to bash Apple. According to the writer's tweets Apple doesn't even see his phone number registered in the iMessage registry, so there could be something even worse going on here.

Source: https://twitter.com/adampash/status/466316191230087168

Re: iMessage purgatory

#68

Post by superuser2 »

jamra wrote: post #27

There is (or at least used to be) an option on your iPhone that forces the messages to be sent and received over SMS rather than iMessage. I wonder if one could turn on that option on their old phone before switching numbers. There was a fairly recent change in how iMessages are handled. In one of the iOS updates, you can receive iMessage messages on numerous devices tied to your Apple ID such as your iPad. I wonder…

I wonder if one could turn on that option on their old phone before switching numbers.

Yes, one can, and this is the correct and documented way to avoid this problem. Unfortunately, people don't generally think about it before asking their carrier to swap out phones on their line, and your iPhone has no way of knowing you intend to deactivate it.

Re: iMessage purgatory

#69

Post by kennywinker »

superuser2 wrote: post #60
kennywinker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's encouraging that they actually have the capability to fix the issue, but you really shouldn't have to call tech support to regain control of your phone number. When you sign up for iMessages they don't say "We take over your phone number and route all texts from iphones to it and you'll have to call tech support to make us stop!"

How do you propose they fix it? Integrating with the infrastructure of every carrier to detect when a not-iPhone is activated on a line previously occupied by an iPhone is probably expensive and invasive to carriers. Also you don't have to call tech support. You can deregister iMessage from Settings (by turning it off) before you activate a new phone.

The issue is a) communicating that to users. and b) Even if you know that, if your phone breaks and you revert to an older phone or a cheap android to tide you over... you didn't get a chance to sign out.

I'd say the problem is they're keeping you signed in for too long. If my phone doesn't check in for 24 hours, shouldn't it un-register me at least until I next check in?

Re: iMessage purgatory

#70

Post by teraflop »

superuser2 wrote: post #60
kennywinker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's encouraging that they actually have the capability to fix the issue, but you really shouldn't have to call tech support to regain control of your phone number. When you sign up for iMessages they don't say "We take over your phone number and route all texts from iphones to it and you'll have to call tech support to make us stop!"

How do you propose they fix it? Integrating with the infrastructure of every carrier to detect when a not-iPhone is activated on a line previously occupied by an iPhone is probably expensive and invasive to carriers. Also you don't have to call tech support. You can deregister iMessage from Settings (by turning it off) before you activate a new phone.

iMessages go through Apple's servers, right? Then if all messages addressed to a particular phone suddenly stop being delivered, surely they can detect that. If a phone fails to check in for some period of time, there's a pretty good chance that the user has switched to a different device, and the messages should be retransmitted as SMS. Even if the timeout is on the order of days, that would still be better than having your messages swallowed by the void forever.

For bonus points, take care of false positives in this system by storing enough metadata in iMessage to deduplicate the iMessage and SMS copies.

Post reply on HN