See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8063349?sortBy=best
1. The sender cannot connect to the imessage server 2. The receiver does not connect to the imessage server, on any of the devices registered to receive at that particular address.
I know both methods happen since I didn't used to have data and I would receive SMSs when someone sent me an imessage and I was out and about.
It is self-seviced https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/
And what you link to is what I meant by
> assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system.
If you don't receive iMessages it will automatically fall back to SMS (unless the sender specifically turned that feature off).
While neither mechanism is perfect, the RCS model treats lack of delivery to the handset as a potential problem, whereas iMessage ignores it. iMessage assumes your phone is just off, which for most people you are texting, is an unlikely scenario.
For users who actively turn off their device for certain activities, you have the opportunity to just wait, and when it arrives the error will clear, or send it as SMS and it will pick it up when the handset does turn on. But while the message is in flight for any length of time, the UI treats it as "something is wrong".
This means whenever you return to the conversation to check for a response or text more, you'll be reminded strongly that the message never arrived for them. And you always have the opportunity to resend on SMS during that time.
That’s the whole point. You’re using it for non-critical things.
I have also had iMesages be sent to the wrong recipient. In one ongoing case, my aunt and uncle frequently receive each other's iMessages, suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan but it's hard to say. The extended family all knows to use SMS instead, which reliably goes to the intended recipient. They are both retired and always together so they haven't reached the point of getting a new plan.
What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.
The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.
It's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't include theft + loss coverage unless you pay for it...
I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).
I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.
In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.
I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).
I call shenanigans.
I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.
But sure, let’s go with self centred.
It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.
Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.
They're explicitly claiming "this happens all the time."
Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.
I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.
And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.
> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan
Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.
I would bet there is at least one overlap or misconfiguration there.