As I mentioned in the previous discussion[1], users are going to have to put up with the system going down... and I just don't see that happening. From the article: "It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wrong spot."
Interestingly, if you break your iPhone on vacation and buy a phone that is not an iPhone so that you can still be contacted until you get home to your favorite Apple Store, you are also losing messages, assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system. Really the design of iMessage is the problem.
If you register your phone number to iMessage without any other iMessage receivers and then turn off that iPhone, messages sent for an extended period of time will continue to be queued for delivery in iMessage. In order for other iPhones to start falling back to SMS you need to manually deregister. In Google Messages and other RCS clients, by default it will give you a "Message not delivered" message indicating your message never made it to the handset. You then have an opportunity to manually resend that pending message via SMS. You can disable this behavior though if you prefer to use the two-check delivery receipt information to determine when your message hits the handset.
While neither mechanism is perfect, the RCS model treats lack of delivery to the handset as a potential problem, whereas iMessage ignores it. iMessage assumes your phone is just off, which for most people you are texting, is an unlikely scenario.
For users who actively turn off their device for certain activities, you have the opportunity to just wait, and when it arrives the error will clear, or send it as SMS and it will pick it up when the handset does turn on. But while the message is in flight for any length of time, the UI treats it as "something is wrong".
This means whenever you return to the conversation to check for a response or text more, you'll be reminded strongly that the message never arrived for them. And you always have the opportunity to resend on SMS during that time.
Not OP, but I believe it falls back to SMS if there isn’t a response from Apple’s servers, not the end user’s device. In this scenario the iMessages are sitting there waiting for a registered device to check in to send them to. (Same thing that happens if your battery dies. iMessages go into a void until some place to deliver it to.)
Yes it does fallback. There are two situations where it does so
1. The sender cannot connect to the imessage server
2. The receiver does not connect to the imessage server, on any of the devices registered to receive at that particular address.
I know both methods happen since I didn't used to have data and I would receive SMSs when someone sent me an imessage and I was out and about.
I think that's if iMessage can't reach Apple's servers. Otherwise that wouldn't make sense; simply being without a cell/wifi signal, or having your phone off, for a few hours, would mean anyone messaging you would be sending a bunch of SMS fallback messages.
It is how it works, after a certain timeout where it can't be delivered to a device it will fallback to SMS. The exact length of the timeout is not public.
No the idea is that you forgot to deregister yourself while still on vacation and using a non-iPhone, the Apple Store bit was the "get a new iPhone" part after your vacation is over.
And what you link to is what I meant by
> assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system.
Doesn't bother me at all. I'm ok with losing a text or two to help bring regulatory pressure against Apple to un-wall the garden so I can use it again.
Apple's iMessage implementation loses messages all the time. It happens about once every month between my girlfriend and I.
I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intended recipient. They are both retired and always together so they haven't reached the point of getting a new plan.
iMessage is routed through apple's servers over TCP. So this is like saying: sometimes I go to google.com but it randomly loads bing.com... must be related to my group carrier plan
What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.
Yeah, who knows? I am only brainstorming. Ever since I discovered the abysmal state of Apple's customer service after having my iphone stolen last year, I feel confident we will never know.
For a stolen phone with AppleCare+ insurance that has been paid for every month since purchasing the phone, they should at least offer a way to file a claim.
The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.
I could believe losing messages. I cannot believe wrong recipient. One of these is a service reliability issue and the other is an insanely unlikely bug.
And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.
> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan
Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.
Adding my own datapoint: I’ve absolutely had this happen on iPhone to iPhone where the message appeared to be sent on one device but the other received nothing
If I was being asked to debug this for someone I know, my first two questions would be “did your phone say delivered?” and “does the recipient have a Mac/iPad/etc that could’ve received the message?”; do you know the answer to either of these?
I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.
I shouldn’t form an opinion based on my own experiences because it might upset you? That’s a pretty self centred view of things.
I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.
That's not how experiences work. If someone says "I saw X" and you say "I didn't see X", that doesn't necessarily mean X doesn't exist, it just means you didn't see it. Sure, the person who saw X might have been hallucinating, but you don't have enough information to know either way.
It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.
Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.
You misread me: if something didn't happen to you that doesn't invalidate the GPs experience, it just means that your experiences differ. Now you have to figure out why they differ.
Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.
I use iMessage regularly, and have done so since it was first released.
I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).
I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.
In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.
The most common case I know of for what looks like misdirection is having one contact with multiple iMessage phone numbers, especially if multiple contacts share one or more of them. Real world example, my wife and I each have both a work iPhone and a personal iPhone. If both are listed in a single contact, iOS will “helpfully” merge the iMessages from both on a sender’s device, but not on the receiver’s. It’s very difficult to tell which device you’re sending to in this case, and can be changed by the other party if they send you a message and you reply. If you didn’t know what was going on, that would look a whole lot like a message going to the wrong device or even recipient in some cases. As a result I literally have separate contacts for my wife to avoid the problem, the UX is otherwise really abysmal.
This is how iMessage works, not contacts, and as a user of the iPhone since its launch in 2007 this is surprisingly unexpected to me. I would expect each separate email/phone number to have its own conversation.
No, that’s only what happens in iMessage or iOS messages. In almost every other context you get one set per number or email, possibly with an option for a combined conversation. That’s really the issue, there’s no indicator in the conversation of which number or email you’re communicating with, or which you’re sending to, and no interface for separating or combining them. It happens non-deterministically at some point after adding multiple to the same contact, sometimes. That’s why I say the UX is poor, it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable even for someone that knows to look.
I am not trying to argue with you. The method of separating or combining emails/numbers to me lies within the contact.
Because imessages can be sent from both emails and phone numbers (e.g. iphone as well as ipad without cellular connection) i’m not sure if there is a way to handle it while also accommodating your preference
Again, this has nothing to do with contacts and everything to do with the interface of the messaging app, as I and the person you responded to said. Also, the person you're replying to literally described a way to handle it while accommodating everyone (offer an indication in the UI of what's happening, and present the option to combine the conversation).
I don't think anyone's claiming the GP's experience is universal. A quick search suggests that there are just under 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world. That's a lot of messages going back and forth. Anyone who's ever worked with distributed systems can tell you that the idea that a message never gets dropped is just hilarious and absurd.
I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).
Youre being downvoted but I also lose a message every few months between my girlfriend and I. We both have relatively new iPhones and exclusively use iMessage so I do think its some rare protocol bug.
Ya I think most just would not notice between friends. But we’ve compared our iMessages and we aren’t doing anything weird like sharing apple IDs. Not a huge deal so it’s whatever, but if any Apple engineers read this: plz fix
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533775