iMessage Should Have a Dead Battery Auto-Responder | Hacker News Reader

iMessage Should Have a Dead Battery Auto-Responder

benjamingilbert.net

31 pointstreblig38 comments

The point is moot. iMessage as delivery notifications. If the message is not marked as "Delivered", it means the other phone didn't get it.

But it can be spotty at times with poor data connection.

Agreed. Whether it's "I don't have service" or "My battery is dead," there are a number of conditions that keep a recipient from seeing a message right away, all of which are (usually) temporary.

Relying on "delivered" takes care of all of those situations, and is much more elegant in the UI than adding an "auto responder" message.

Does 'Delivered' show up when the message is received by another iOS device? e.g. I often leave my iPad at home but still connected to iMessage, and if that receives the messages my iPhone doesn't, wouldn't this give a false impression of delivery to the sender?

iMessage's are sent to all of your devices. I have iMessage on my mac, iPhone & iPad. All 3 devices receive messages sent to me. That's true even if one of the device is turned off for some period of time. Apple, did seem to go through some growing pains where this didn't always work as above.

To answer your other question the delivered flag is set if any of your devices receives the message.

iMessage gets tricky when you have multiple devices.

For example, I went out of the country, but left my iPad at home (which also receives iMessages to my phone #). Because my phone wasn't data roaming, and my iPad was still on the network at home, iMessages were being delivered to the iPad. It basically meant anyone with an iPhone couldn't text me, because the text message fallback wasn't triggering. I had to find wifi with my iPhone to catch up on texts.

The "dead battery" auto-responder has the same issue. What if my iPhone battery is dead, but I'm on a Mountain Lion MacBook and getting messages there?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The iMessage client can't keep messages in order or search them, let alone do anything complicated like that.

Messages has a search bar at the top of the main tableview.

Message search is also built into the iOS spotlight screen (left of first home screen).

On both systems, you can't do anything but search for the first instance of a message. It is completely and utterly useless. It also hangs and and crashes on my system if you try.

ED: I tried searching for a word in Messages at five minutes ago, and the results still haven't appeared. 100% CPU usage.

ED2: 10 minutes now, 2.24GB of memory use.

ED3: Results showed, then client crashed at 13 minutes.

Hmm. Works 100% reliably for me. Wish I could say the same for my email, which works about 10% of the time on my phone.

It's really unreliable and half assed. The parent commenter is a absolutely right. iMessage is full of bugs they need to really fix them! They have done an amazing thing though.

Sidenote: apple has the ability to mine so many conversations for data. It's more intimate than twitter and I'd imagine more iMessages are sent each day than tweets. If something happens anywhere in the world Apple would theoretically be the first to know. Kinda nuts.

I wasn't aware how buggy Messages application can be until I started using it more. Weird UI glitches, messages coming out of order (?) are the two I notice often.

End to End encryption :)

...is a feature iMessage does not offer.

It's not? Are you 100%

I've seen nothing to suggest that it does, just some funky key exchange for authentication.

There are privacy concerns when you tell people about the state of another persons device. There is also the concept of sending a message saying a devices battery is dead "gosh iPhones always have dead batteries I keep getting this alert from my friends". These are good intention designs but not quite there.

iMessages has built in notification to the sender if the message has been delivered to the receiver, hence the status "Delivered" or (if receiver has opted-in) also Read status. I see no point in this feature, since the phone could be dead for various reasons, not just battery

It would be nice if the delivered indicator could be relied upon, but it seems to report that a message has been delivered once the Apple servers have received it, not when the destination device has received it.

This is especially noticeable under poor network conditions (I think I first noticed it at a music festival where even regular SMS messages struggled to get through due to network congestion).

Nope. It needs to hit a device to say Delivered.

For example, if the recipient is out of 3G data coverage but can fall back to SMS, you won't get Delivered, you'll get a line across your conversation denoting a switch to Text Message and a different color bubble.

(Several people I message are in marginal coverage areas several hours a day, so I get to see this in action daily.)

This doesn't make any sense at all. iMessage is now tied to my iPhone, my iPad, an iPod Touch, two iMacs, and a Macbook Air. If my iPhone's battery dies, how will Apple know that I'm not in front of another device capable of getting messages?

"One potential reason that Apple wouldn’t implement this feature is that it increases user awareness of dead iPhone batteries" I don't even

I usually “know” someone’s phone has died when 2 straight messages go through as SMS, but a standard notification would be awesome.

Why not turn it around and have iMessages send a "message received" notification when receiving a message? Have it display like a little checkmark next to any sent message that turns green if the other phone pings back. Just that - no read receipt like there is now, as that isn't always convenient.

It already does, they're called read receipts.

it also have delivered receipts, they are turned on by default opposed to the read receipts (which need to be turned on manually).

A simple 'read receipt' would be much better, if its not already built in, although I suspect it is.

It is.

Yep, it is built in, but many (including myself) disable it. It's pretty common that I accidentally open a message, but I don't have a response / a chance to respond yet, and I don't want the person to think I'm ignoring them.

Yeah, plausible deniability. I know a work place which demands them for email. Evil.

In fact, SMS already has this system in place. Naturally there are some networks/phones that don't support it, and its meaning can vary from "network received" to "phone received".

I like this, but can see some problems with iMessage on multiple devices. Ignoring that, I'd love to get a push notification at ~5% battery asking me if I'd like to put an auto-responder on.

It can't make any negative remarks about the battery life of any idevice, but it could be kinda nice if it said whether or not the receivers idevice is turned off.

The problem hasn't got anything to do with delivery notifications or auto-responders: if you need an answer right away you must use a synchronous form of communication, e.g. voice call.

iMessage, SMS, email et al are async by design. Until you hear or see an ack that's from the actual recipient (and not something automated by a device), you can't be sure the message has been properly received.

iMessage has a "send read receipt" feature (deactivated by default).

Yes, but that doesn't mean the recipient actually read it - it means that iMessage is/has been the active application on at least one of the recipient's devices.

Many XMPP clients support message delivery receipts. Maybe there is also one for iOS.

But I use "my was battery dead" excuse when i am too lazy to respond.

This is exactly what I was thinking!

if it did you wouldn't be able to use it as an excuse...

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