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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reason why the Apple iOS messaging app is so popular. IIUC, when sending messages among users who have iPhones, SMS is not used.

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iMessage has had some interesting bugs:

* 2014 -- if you switch from an iOS device to an Android device, iPhone users who try to send you text messages that are channeled via iMessage will have their messages silently vanish ( https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-fix-apples-imessage-bug/ ; IIRC after a lawsuit, they added a remarkable little support page, https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/ )

* 2016 -- Apple iPhone devices were being used to send text messages which were going to the wrong recipient ( https://wp.josh.com/2016/10/26/divorced-by-apple-in-californ... , discussed at e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12797249 )

The flip-side to this is that if you have a regular number which you use without an Apple device and use the same number in your Apple settings, your SMS get hijacked, and only show up on the Apple devices, which you may not look at for weeks.

(Ask me how I know this.)

How do you know this? Is this old?

I have a few Google Fi data only sims and as soon as I put one in an iPhone, iMessages to the original sims number stop going through at all.

I remember there used to be issues like this when people switched to Android. Though this could still be an issue and maybe inserting a sim with a different number causes Apple to automatically unregister the original number, but just moving the sim does not.

I guess this is technically by design, but only if you have your iCloud account associate the number with iMessage (you toggle the send/receive from the number in the settings).

So even if your phone isn't using imessage, if your computer or ipad is, they'll receive the imessages and apple doesn't also send a text in addition to the imessage for the non-Apple device.

What prompted you to write an, essentially, Apple marketing piece when there's no good reason to do so?

Or WhatsApp, if you want to message people who aren't on ios.

Or signal, which has similar functionality but is always end to end encrypted and open source.

...or Matrix, or XMPP, which are decentralized and where attaching your phone number to account is optional.

And don’t mind Facebook having your data.

Keybase is where it is at. Even my parents are on it. Group messages that work and some attempt at security and privacy - all for free-99.

Don't forget about Signal. It works great as an sms replacement

It sounds like this company only exists to transfer text messages from one carrier's network to another. If that's the case, then any monoculture would have prevented this, it wouldn't have to be Apple's walled garden.

You can pick to use SMS, but by default they'll use iMessage.

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