“Apple has added a page to its website for deregistering and turning off iMessage for users that have switched from an iPhone to an Android device or other non-Apple smartphone,” Joe Rossignol reports for 9to5Mac.
“The new web-based tool arrives after Apple faced a lawsuit over Android users having undelivered text messages from other iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users still using iMessage,” Rossignol reports. “For those that have switched to another smartphone and no longer own an iPhone, the website provides a field where you can enter your phone number, receive a confirmation code and enter that code to confirm your iMessage deregistration.
Rossignol reports, “Apple also reiterates instructions on how to deregister and turn off iMessage if you still have an iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We have an even more effective solution: Don’t downgrade from an iPhone to an inferior iPhone knockoff.
In the immortal words of Ben Stern, “I told you not to be stupid, you moron.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple sued for 2nd time over iMessage failure to deliver texts to Android phones – May 17, 2014
Apple sued over vanishing texts to Android phones – May 17, 2014
This happened when I picked up an old iPhone and popped in a T-Mobile sim for my aunt from overseas to use. She said some guy named Ralph kept imessaging her
This probably has nothing to do with the flaws in iMessage, but is related to either:
1. the T-Mobile SIM and its phone number has at one time been associated with the iMessage service (if the SIM card is yours, than guy namer Ralph must be one of your contacts); or,
2. The old iPhone has been associated with an iCloud ID that has some guy named Ralph in its Contacts list.
You mean the putz who sold them an Android phone at Best Buy didn’t know that they should turn off iMessage before deactivating their old iPhone? Yes, let’s sue Apple because of Best Buy’s incompetent sales schmucks!
best buy and incompetent are one redundancy, add sales and schmucks and it increased the redundancy multifold, dare i say exponentially !-)
This just shows iMessage suffers from bad design. I don’t have cellular data so when I leave the house and don’t have access to a wifi connection, I don’t receive txts from anyone with an iPhone until I get home. I thought the servers would be pinging to see if the recipient is available before hijacking SMS.
Roll on the 1 star ratings!
Careful about inferring that Apple has bad design around here. People here seem to think that their favorite megacorporation is infallible. Frankly, since 2010, Apple’s software design aesthetic has gone to flat ugly user-unfriendly shit. We have been troubleshooting more errors on both Mac and iOS and forrced to seek assistance from online help forums in the past few years than we did in the first 6 iterations of Mac OS X combined. Sad to see Apple get closer to the Microsoft operating model.
There is an avalanche of fanboi responses to this issue on MDN, which shouldn’t surprise me, I guess (I’m the first in line of the fanbois when there is a legitimate reason).
This is absolutely a poorly designed service. While it affects an extremely minuscule portion of the market, the problem exists and is real.
The fundamental flaw in this problem is when iPhone users send texts to others. There is a universal protocol for sending SMS/MMS that works throughout the world, with all mobile carriers, on all mobile devices, across technologies (GSM/CDMA/TDMA…), frequencies and national borders. Then there is iMessage. And the problem is that iMessage is designed to be completely transparent to the user: an iPhone owner sends what he believes to be an ordinary text message (presumably using SMS or MMS), but the iPhone hijacks that text and diverts it to its own proprietary iMessage service, in order to use data network (rather than the standard SMS protocol) for the delivery of that message. This doesn’t happen always; it depends on whether the recipient of that message has registered his phone number and the associated phone as an iMessage device. Under normal circumstances, there is absolutely no difference between SMS and iMessage: a text (or multimedia) message is sent from one iPhone, and received by the other iPhone; the only difference is blue “speech bubble” instead of green. So what’s the benefit of the iMessage? Well, since it uses ordinary data network, you can presumably send a “text” (more precisely, iMessage) message to another iPhone user even if you only have a WiFi connection, and no mobile network signal (inside some office buildings, for example). Also, you can use iMessage to send messages that appear like texts from a non-iPhone Apple device (a Mac, an iPad, or an iPod touch).
Unfortunately, the drawbacks of the iMessage are much more troubling than the advantages. There are apparently quite a few people who use unlocked, unsubsidised iPhones with cheap prepaid plans that have no data (just voice and text). These can be had for $20 per month. With omnipresent WiFi, this isn’t a significant hindrance to the usability of the iPhone. Except when you try to send (or have to receive) a text message from another iPhone. Because you aren’t connected to the internet, any incoming iMessage messages would end up going into a black hole with no warning or error message, neither for sender, nor the receiver, until you re-connect to WiFi (or mobile data). This is colossally annoying if you have one of those voice and text only mobile plans. There is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to receive normal texts, but this would require every one of your friends who have iPhones to know that when they send their texts to you, they would sometimes have to use ordinary SMS. When? They can’t know, other than you not responding right away to their texts. Or you would simply have disconnect your number from iMessage service completely (thus eliminating its advantages for those situations when you do have WiFi connection).
The iMessage service is a major mess that must be cleaned up properly. As it is now, it is an inconsistent service with which you’ll never know if your recipient is receiving your messages or not.
And yet hundreds of millions of iMessage users have no problems.
Only as long as the sender, as well as the recipient, don’t move from iPhone to another device, or the sender (or recipient) doesn’t use a mobile service without the data component.
As i said before; the problem affects minuscule portion of the iPhone population, but the way it manifests itself is simply unacceptable. This isn’t a weird and difficult-to-identify bug. It is a poorly designed service that works in an unacceptable way for users that fall into a clearly defined group (as mentioned at the beginning of this post).
I hope the, TURNED OFF?!? by deault setting- “Send as SMS when iMessage is unavailable” isn’t a clue to poor direction Apple software is heading. I’m not sure why this setting exists but why its off by default is troubling. It might as well say “if iMessage is unavailable to you want me to act as if I’ve sent the message but wait for an internet connection, no matter how many hours pass with the message still unsent?”
if you’re going to type 6 letters why not just type “fanboy”, instead of “fanboi”? The latter is gay. where did that start anyway?
In the 90s with gamers, when it was ‘vidboi’
I hope the website Apple have setup is IE only, uses Flash and the font is Comic Sans.
That’s what people who ditch iOS deserve 🙂
In case you haven’t noticed, Comic Sans is vastly easier to read than Ive’s shitty choice of grey Helvetica Neue. When typing in a code or password, can you tell the difference between a capital “i”, the number one, and the lower case “L”?
One can’t read this out loud without changing it to a different SERIF font:
I7Iil1lL
But on iOS, Apple refuses to let you select a serif font. That’s lame.