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> It's also not some obscure hidden setting to choose a different delivery pathway in the Messages app: it's one button and the -only- option on the screen when choosing a recipient.

Really? On iOS 17, when I choose a recipient in the Messages app, I can indeed select the dropdown and choose a phone number or email. I cannot choose a phone number that is associated with iMessage but ask for SMS.

But it’s much worse than that. Once I select a phone number or email and start a conversation, it’s very difficult to tell which selection was made. (In fact, I’m not sure a reliable way to tell is wired into the UI at all.)

In Apple’s very very slight defense, I don’t think this is an intentionally anticompetitive design. I think it’s merely a very poor design. I somewhat regularly have problems getting messages to work right even when all parties have iPhones. It’s damn near impossible to debug, and even fixing it once debugged is hard because you can’t change the settings after starting a conversation and because you can easily end up with multiple apparently identical simultaneously existing conversations, involving exactly the same contacts but different endpoints (emails/phones), some of which work and some of which don’t. And this happens even when literally every involved device is made by Apple, running the latest OS.

iMessage’s user identifiers are just utterly crappy.

What you talked about - iOS “hiding” stuff to make it simple, often at any/all cost(s), is IMO one of apple’s biggest engineering flaws. I’ve experienced numerous crashes and issues that would’ve at least given me an error code/message on windows, something I could debug or fix. This hiding is also why I think most iPhone users don’t understand the difference between iMessage and SMS.

Hi, author here. (A woman.)

I think a fair criticism of my post might be that it was written in a moment of obvious annoyance, and failed to spend enough time connecting the griping about the personal experience to larger problems, but it was definitely not "written to manipulate people into believing a false narrative."

> the whole faux-drama would have been solved by simply turning off iMessage on his or his mother's device.

We tried turning off iMessage on the laptop, as mentioned in the post. It does not revert other devices' behavior to SMS.

> Which is false: the messages would be sent to her mac, and they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue.

She certainly won't receive them on her phone, no? It's bad enough, never mind that I'm not around to surveil her computer.

> It's how a normal, not-tech savvy, person chooses a different phone number for a contact that has multiple phone numbers, and iMessage will remember that choice for the future.

Unless, as here, the contact email becomes associated with something that supports iMessage, in which case Messages will stop using the chosen phone number. Neither of us have data to make an argument about how common it is for people to mess with this, so I can only note that I myself have never overridden the originally-chosen contact method before. Either way, there is no signal that someone might need to do this, since, as mentioned, the blue bubbles look to have been delivered just fine.

> And if all of that is too hard, his mother could simply send him a message and the messages app will reply to her phone number, it won't auto switch to her email address.

We tried this, and this is not the behavior we observed. Also, even if this had worked, she would have needed to quickly text... all of her contacts with iPhones in order to get them on the right pathway?

Ultimately, if you think there's no problem here, that's your right. I chose not to include screenshots because a. that would have been more effort, and b. they'd have my mother's PII in them, and properly censoring that all out would have been even more effort.

This whole situation is a PITA that I didn't intend to bring upon my family. The comments here evidence a divide between people thinking this behavior is obvious and people thinking it's highly non-obvious. That's interesting enough to me to feel it was worth having shared.

Hi author, sorry for referring to you as a male.

Bull. My sister switched to a dumb phone, and I couldn’t get my phone to text her anymore. I knew precisely what the problem was, as well as how to fix it, but it simply didn’t work half the time. It would just send a message to her computer that she might get a couple of days later.

Messaging between an iPhone (with iMessage) and a dumb phone (with SMS) absolutely works, but Apple has no interest in showing you how to get out of the iMessage bubble (pun intended) once you're in. They want to pull you into their ecosystem because that makes them money but if you want out, you're on your own. Lots of companies behave like that, only consumer protection laws could force them to change.

I reported Apple to the FCC. Fun fact: the FCC are looking for complainants for precisely the hijacking of SMS from Messages.

What you’re describing isn’t even what the article is about.

For your problem: users that haven’t deregistered their phone number from iMessage when switching to a non-Apple phone: there is the option of using a website to deregister, calling customer service, or simply waiting as iMessage will release registered numbers after a short period anyway.

It's definitely about what the article is about. People fundamentally don't understand that iMessage is not vanilla texting. They know you send messages to phone numbers. The fact that you need to do a secret step to stop having your messages routed to a platform you don't use anymore is wild and unintuitive and plays directly into the argument that Apple/iMessage is abusing its market position.

Did you read the article?

Yeah, it's the same problem in both directions. Whether the sender or the receiver is the root cause of the bad routing of messages doesn't matter: normal people text phone numbers, which are represented by contacts in their phone. Apple doesn't abide by this intent and instead prefers their own platform for messaging regardless of what the user(s) use or want. Whether I put your number and email on the same contact and my messages go to the wrong device or you stop using an iPhone and disconnect your iMessage from your phone doesn't matter—it's the same fundamental issue caused by nonobvious behavior of a proprietary system that pretends to be what the user expects it to be. This is what happens when you recycle the same UIs and metaphors (as a market dominance strategy, no less!) for two similar but separate and incompatible systems.

If we all didn't have a decade or so of experience text messaging before Apple built their own messaging platform, maybe this wouldn't be a problem. But here we are.

Then you didn't understand the article. This is a situation when writing a message to a named recipient will default to an iMessage email address and not their non-iMessage phone number (and only for the first message mind you.)

The solution: one drop down menu and selecting the phone number, or simply deactiving iMessage if they don't want to use it.

Why this matters: The user made the choice to enable iMessage as part of an optional set up process on their Mac. They did this to themselves, and could very easily undo it, but wrote a bullshit article instead. It's a case of "Professional computer person" is either an idiot, or not worth hiring.

Also I'm over-joyed at the "very smart" people in here who seemingly think this is very hard stuff.

> The solution: one drop down menu and selecting the phone number,

This is why you're wrong. It's not about "using the phone number". You as the sender have no way to know whether they have iMessage on their phone or not. You can't say "use iMessage or SMS?" because if they do have it on their phone, you don't want to use SMS.

> The user made the choice to enable iMessage as part of an optional set up process on their Mac.

Imagine explaining to your mom that this is her own fault and it's happening because she checked a box during the setup for her computer. You can't get back to the setup, you just have to figure out how to dig through settings to turn it off.

How would anyone intuit that the consequence of checking that box will suddenly start making text messages that used to go to your android phone suddenly start going to your laptop instead? That's insane behavior.

Moreover, if your suggested fix for this "professional computer person" is to remove the email from the contact, that's not really a fix, is it? Now you just have to hope you remember the email address and that nobody else adds the phone number and email to their contacts.

Software engineers build software for people. If you find yourself suggesting that it's the user's fault for experiencing some unhinged software behavior, you've lost your way. These interactions suck because of iMessage, not because the users are "idiots".

No. The problem was that it refused to send to her number and instead kept sending to her iMessage email address in my contact. Even when I tried to specify to send it to her number instead of her email address.

This is nonsense - most people don't know the difference between imessages and SMS, it absolutely is surprising behaviour for the user that the messages now go to an app on her laptop that she may not even use.

Well she had to set it up on the laptop to work that way. It’s not automatic kiddo.

Plus this is the sender writing a message to her email address. Her laptop didn’t steal her phone number.

Maybe they don’t know all the intracies, but they certainly know the difference, that’s why there’s such a cultural big deal about blue versus green bubbles.

Everybody knows when one person in a text group isn’t using iMessage, and they usually hate it.

Even I assumed imessage was just an SMS client until just now.

You're saying it's not? And you're saying everyone knows this? I say incorrect.

This is indeed totally surprising and inexplicable behavior.

Indeed here’s the NYT bemoaning “green bubble shaming”: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/technology/personaltech/a...

If people don’t know it (at some level like intuition), why is that everyone I know (including non-tech 55 year olds) see the green bubble and know the other person has android instead of an iPhone?

It just means the sms client can tell the difference. How exactly could be anything. They don't know enough to even know that this would require two seperate back-end services rather than the same back-end service with some optional extra special data added to the transaction. They don't even think of the words "client" or "back-end" or "transaction" like I just said. The fact that their iphone can tell that the other phone is not using imessage is not remarkable at all to them, or me for that matter.

Sure, but by that (correct) reasoning the fact that it’s SMS (as a system) or some other system is similarly irrelevant to them and not the terms they think in.

Right. Another way I though to to say it is "What do you think the average person's concept is for how their phone knows a txt came from Bob vs Alice?" IE, how does my txt app know to display your phone number instead of some other phone number?

Answer: "idk, tech magic." They know there is some way that isn't actually magic, they know there are mechanics, but they don't know or need to know what the mechanics are.

How it knows to display a green bubble or a blue bubble is exactly like that. That's what I mean by it's not a remarkable thing to anyone that the txt app does this. Q: How? A: Somehow. They don't see it and think "Wow, this proves that there are two unrelated back-end systems."

> they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue

Isn’t that an opt-in feature that would have to be enabled on the laptop, not by default?

Delivered is not opt-in, and in fact it isn’t even opt-out. Read receipts, on the other hand, are opt-in.

Sure but many people leave their computers on all the time, even if they're not with them.

The author is a woman, by the way.