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Comment by xen2xen1 | Hacker News Reader

IOS 9 or 10 (been a while) turned off SMS fallback when the user upgraded to that version. People kept calling and complaining texting no longer worked, and it was just that they could only text IPhones. That was 100% a dark pattern / monopoly practice with no reason but to ensure market share.

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I'm sorry, but that doesn't seem accurate. I've been using iOS since ~2015 and I don't recall ever having lost the ability to send or receive SMS messages.

If you left iMessage on when you upgraded from iOS to an Android device, everyone who had an iPhone would still be attempting to send you iMessages and you'd never get them on your Android phone.

If you downgraded to an Android device without first telling iMessage that your phone number was no longer on the iMessage network, then it would fail. This is unrelated to SMS fallback on an iPhone sending iMessages.

I had 25 IPhones all turn off the SMS fallback on the upgrade, and found Apple documentation for such. It was an intentional act, and happened over and over.

Can you link to the apple documentation? I've never experienced this phenomenon you are describing, nor has any of my friends & family.

Probably not since it likely does not exist. Will update or delete this if they do follow through.

Well, if we are going for anecdotal evidence, that hasn't happened to me even once over the past 4 iPhone upgrades. SMS as fallback is enabled by default, and it has been this way for every single device I upgraded to so far.

What do you mean? My iPhone often falls back to SMS, even when the other party has an iPhone in a poor reception area.

I saw, with my own eyes, an IPhone upgrade to a new major IOS version and the SMS fallback setting turn off. The change may have been walked back, but I saw it myself, and had to fix it on dozens of phones.

I have sms fall back turned off and I can still send sms. All that check box does ask you if you want to send SMS if iMessage is unavailable instead of automatically sending SMS.

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