Apple finally makes it easy to disable iMessage

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-11/10/deregister-from-apple-imessage

by riaface • 12 years ago

92 47 12 years ago

wired.co.uk

scrumper• 12 years ago

We'll see if it fixes the big issue I'm having - a friend who ditched his iPhone can exchange SMS messages with me and others individually, but he can't participate in group threads anymore. No error, he just never receives the messages.

octo_t• 12 years ago

how do you think group threads work? they don't exist outside the iMessage world at all.

Ricapar• 12 years ago

Group threads are done over MMS. They absolutely do exist out of iMessage.

berberous• 12 years ago

What Android SMS app does he use? Tell him to try another. Group texts over MMS appears to be somewhat of a kludge, and different text apps support or do not support it to differing degrees. For some of the ones that do, 80% of their changelogs appear to be "Improved support for group texts / MMS bug fixes".

ogreface• 12 years ago

I have this exact issue. When I used the de-register tool, it said that I wasn't registered with iMessage. I don't have high hopes here...

andale• 12 years ago

Likewise here - switched from iPhone (on Verizon) to Android (on T-Mobile), and in several group threads I no longer see the replies of some of the participants. Truly frustrating, and makes you feel marginalized from the conversation.

jevinskie• 12 years ago

Seconded. I still have the old iPhone. I wonder if reregistering and deregistering with the new tool will help or just make things worse.

This is only an issue for me because Apple made the arbitrary decision to make your iPhone functionally useless after a restore unless you insert a SIM. I still use my iPhone for dev. Guess what happened after a restore once I inserted my SIM? My iPhone automatically enrolled my phone number in iMessages. I spent months getting SMS working after switching to Android and I'm back at square one. This is antitrust level BS.

ben1040• 12 years ago

I've found that the best way to fix this is to get everyone who participates in the group conversation to delete the conversation from their phones. Then once everyone's done that, one person can send a message to everyone else and it should use SMS.

In my experience, it looks like iMessage stores metadata about the chat medium for a given conversation, and that's determined upon creating the conversation.

When sending individual messages, iMessage doesn't seem to attempt to determine whether conversation partner has gone dark from iMessage and fall back to MMS going forward. So everyone else gets the message, but not the person without an iPhone.

sudhirj• 12 years ago

Why is the list of countries so small? (India seems to be left out). That simply doesn't make sense for a global company. iMessages and iTunes SMSes worked perfectly, so it's not like they don't have capabilities here.

laacz• 12 years ago

Yes, as it also makes it impossible to deregister number from iMessaging service from those countries (my included).

atonse• 12 years ago

I have a different problem - I did a T-Mobile tryout and had an iPhone with a different number for a week. And then I returned it. I can't remove that number. I hope the new person that got it doesn't get my messages.

Hopefully you can only associate one number with iMessage.

dignick• 12 years ago

I had this issue, reset your network settings and turn off and on iMessage. Maybe try without resetting first.

JohnTHaller• 12 years ago

The phone has already been returned. So, forget about getting texts from your iPhone friends.

leonk• 12 years ago

There's a much bigger issue, the default iPhone settings has "Send as SMS" off, this means that if a failed iMessage attempt occurs, it will just give up (rather than sending by SMS).

I've tried disabling iMessage on my iphone several times. I then have nothing connected to my iMessage account, but I still miss out on loads of messages from people who have the "Send by SMS" option disabled. Their devices are not told that I am no longer using iMessage.

I went to the apple store to ask about this, and I was told the only solution was to get all my contacts to ensure "Send by SMS" is turned on. Which is frankly absolutely ridiculous!

riaface• 12 years ago

Did they say that with a straight face? I can't believe that would be serious advice! "You literally need to contact everyone in your address book and make sure they have the right settings."

dijit• 12 years ago

No, you remove your number from the imessage "My Addresses" list and everyone else will see nothing different except the send button is green now.

the problem that really exists with iMessage is that it's easy to enroll but people forget to unenroll when they move their number away from iPhone.

Terretta• 12 years ago

There's a much bigger issue, the default iPhone settings has "Send as SMS" off, this means that if a failed iMessage attempt occurs, it will just give up (rather than sending by SMS).

So by default, it sends a secure end-to-end message, and you'd prefer it to fail back and send an insecure SMS logged by your telco? (Verizon, for example, makes your SMS history available in a web portal.)

I think the bigger issue would be if iMessage burned your SMS plan and sent insecure messages without you explicitly asking to.

Defaulting to losing the security and privacy seems more "frankly absolutely ridiculous".

geofft• 12 years ago

Availability is part of security, right next to confidentiality and integrity. Systems that silently fail closed aren't secure in a meaningful way, because you can't distinguish a DoS from "working as designed".

untog• 12 years ago

That's a very generous reading of the situation. How many iPhone users bought their device because it offers secure end-to-end messaging? I'm going to say very few of them. How many of them even know what the blue bubble and the green bubble mean?

I think a lot more users would be surprised that iMessage doesn't burn through your SMS plan than those would be surprised if it did.

mikeash• 12 years ago

He implies a nice middle road: don't automatically fall back to SMS, but inform the user that the recipient cannot be reached on iMessage and SMS must be enabled if you want to talk to them.

ender7• 12 years ago

What? The correct behavior here is to realize that the target no longer supports iMessage and return to non-iMessage behavior. This should involve swapping the UI from blue back to green so the user is aware.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

I'd rather have my telco read over my shoulder than Apple.

Telcos being in the business of handling my conversations anyway and Apple being a hardware vendor from a different continent.

0x0• 12 years ago

Maybe the spooks have tagged a rogue imessage recipient key onto your account, leaving the total remaining count > 0 ;)

micampe3• 12 years ago

the default iPhone settings has "Send as SMS" off

I don't think this is true. I have a phone here I only use for development where I don't think I changed that setting and it's on.

flatdeviant• 12 years ago

Nope, I've had to reinstall iOS several times recently and I can confirm that every time, it was turned off. Maybe this depends on your SIM/carrier?

lukeholder• 12 years ago

I think the problem was that sometimes the iMessage did get delivered, but to an iPad, a Mac, or some other device with iMessage set up using the same Apple ID - so they couldn't just wait to see if the iMessage failed and then just send as a normal SMS.

dzhiurgis• 12 years ago

My problem is sending SMS when you are roaming abroad. iMessage will attempt to send it's thing even though you are offline, then fail few minutes later and it's only then you can tap and hold to send as SMS.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

I assume Apple couldn't get the lawsuits dropped, so they were forced into making concessions to their customers. Prediction: this tool will be ungoogleable, and discoverable only from a visit to an Apple store, or the last step of a support call.

There is no technical reason for iMessage to behave as it does, only business reasons. I can come up with a more intuitive UI for this tool right now - make disabling iMessage send "curl -X POST [whatever] http://apple.com/technicallyyoucanturnitoff.now ". Done.

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edit:

Is 45 days still in effect?

"If you want to transfer your SIM card or phone number to a device that doesn't support iMessage

"Go to Settings > Messages and turn off iMessage if you plan to transfer your SIM card or phone number from an iPhone to a device that doesn't support iMessage. If you don't, other iOS devices might continue to try to send you messages using iMessage, instead of using SMS or MMS, for up to 45 days."

http://support.apple.com/en-us/TS2755

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edit2:

This change was directly a result of the lawsuit, which went into mediation 2 weeks ago in preparation for a settlement.

Lawsuit: http://www.slideshare.net/harrisonrweber/apple-imessage-laws...

News of settlement: http://www.law360.com/articles/590726

better: http://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/lawsuit-news/...

Apple could have done this at any time, but chose not to.

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last edit:

from the lawsuit filing -

"49. Apple's business practice of distributing, marketing, and its iMessage and Messages service and application in the manner described herein is also an unfair business practice because it, inter alia, threatens to harm competition in its incipiency. Class members and others who become aware that switching their Apple iPhone or other wireless devices in favor of non-Apple products will result in these persons not being able to receive text messages sent to them by other Apple users are likely to be disincentivized from switching from Apple to an Apple competitor. [...]"

bsaul• 12 years ago

Is it just an optical illusion, or does Apple really has a problem with anything related to network programming ? Every single time i hear about any technology they're developing that is vaguely related to network, i have the feeling something is going to break up.

I say "network" because i think it goes from

- web sites : their developper and itunes connect website is a shame, app store discovery simply doesn't work, i've never even tried to open an icloud drive document on the web because of how poorly advertized it is, etc.. ,

- their web related technologies: icloud sync in general feels historically unreliable, even more so when you combine it with coredata, no server-side programming language (swift could be a fantastic opportunity but nothing was even advertized by apple), their network api on iOS was so raw that the most popular iOS lib is AFNetworking that was developped by a single guy (at least the first release) and made a world of difference.

- Even wifi and 3G connectivity is often buggy on iOS and MacOS: see the infamous bluetooth+wifi bug plaguing yosemite today.

And i could go on and on. It seems that network is just beyond Apple. Now of course it may be a bit harsh to them because they do have among the biggest user base for their service, but if you compare them to Google, Dropox, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and all the other tech giants of today, you can't ignore that there is definitely something special in that area with Apple.

acmecorps• 12 years ago

On the other hand, their bonjour service is top notch (anecdotally, but still).

jstultz• 12 years ago

It will be interesting to see if it actually works this time around; just having a new interface for deregistering from iMessage does not convince me that it will solve the issues.

The most frustrating, for me, is that in a one-on-one conversation, if your iPhone attempts and fails to send an iMessage to someone, it will tell you that it failed and allow you to send it as SMS instead.

However, in a group, if it attempts to send an iMessage to a member of the group that does not actually have a device supporting iMessage, it will silently fail; you will not know that the message was not sent to that person, nor will you be able to force it to send as SMS even if you know they did not receive it.

Apple finally makes it easy to disable iMessage

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