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Comment by Ntrails | Hacker News Reader

The merging of iMessage and SMS is something that I've always thought Apple did really well. I don't care how the message is sent, as long as it is sent. Create a quick hierarchy and send in preferable order. That's exactly what it does.

I spend a lot of time without either signal or internet when in the countryside and this allows me to seamlessly communicate. The last thing I want is to either switch programs to carry on conversations, or manually choose what kind of message to send. Both would be a pain.

My main objectbbion to iMessage is that it only works with other apple products, so I end up using whatsapp with some people - where I need 2 apps to handle simple messaging and conversation histories get split up etc etc.

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>I don't care how the message is sent, as long as it is sent.

Friend of mine has an iPad and an iPhone, often her iPhone data plan runs out so I send a message, it's blue and acts like it's delivered.... then I get a reply 6 hours later when she finally gets home and sees it on her iPad because the iPhone never received it because it didn't have a data connection.

Worst part is sometimes I know I need to send it SMS and it's a real pain trying to convinced iMessage to send SMS when it think the person is online with iMessage due to an iPad being left on somewhere. Can never remember which tap and hold dance actually gives me the SMS option.

This x1000. Plus when it silently decides to send emails instead, or you email as caller id address, or whatever it does. When my Dad asks "Why I'm I getting emails from text messsages" I don't know, don't care to know, and will respond by not using iProduct. Don't care if it's a setting or what, if you're going to merge different services then be explicit about it. Don't have time to figure out what you thought was best for me.

Is that Messages or is that the phone company that does that? Mine always come from an AT&T email account with some generic sender, like "aehcu2341@att.com".

Ya I've had those too. Think it's a separate issue but was never able to figure it out.

Tap and hold the message you sent over iMessage. Click send as sms.

Which is a totally undiscoverable feature.

Undiscoverable features is the new way to design apps! Look at Snapchat

'Swipe randomly in random directions from random screens until you see something you didn't know was there' is the new 'simple and direct'.

Not only is it undiscoverable, you don't even think you need to do it. Like others said- you take out your phone, send a quick message, put your phone away and do something, only to find out your message wasn't sent. Possibly because the recipient, unknown to you, didn't have data access.

I did too until I changed work location from always great signal to marginal. Lots of phone apps don't handle this gracefully (I think most expect perfect data). IMessage could have popped a dialog at 10s (30s), but decided to wait forever instead. Then I started to dislike it. This is a good time ago now, they may have sorted this, I've been Android the last 5 years or so. :)

Agree on the messaging. I miss just having adium or pidgin connected to everything, now I'd need a dozen chat apps to stay in touch with everyone!

iMessage is "ok" now. I'm not sure the time duration, but I can usually long-press a message that isn't sending and tell it to send it as SMS or MMS. I don't think (maybe this has changed?) that that option is available immediately.

I've been using Telegram for my cross-platform messaging and it works quite well. On OS X, it feels like a Mac app with embellishments, on Windows it feels modern and clean like a Windows 10 app should, unlike most apps on Windows 10 (including Microsoft's). On iOS it behaves like an iOS app, and who knows about Android but I would guess it's the same.

And yet, they also all behave the same. There's a consistency across all of the apps that makes it clear they're the exact same app, but there's also a consistency with the platform that makes them feel like native apps everywhere.

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