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Comment by jc4p | Hacker News Reader

I went through this last month when I switched to the Nexus 5, had no clue I wasn't getting messages until someone with an iPhone tweeted at me asking why I as ignoring them.

However, all it took from me was a call to Apple's customer service, I told them I had just switched off my iPhone and no longer got texts from people with iMessage and they immediately sent me to a tech that fixed the problem for me.

Have you been explaining it correctly when you call? All I said was "I had an iPhone until last week, switched to another phone but I'm still registered for iMessage"

Edit: According to my phone I called 1-800-692-7753 (Which is just 1-800-MY-APPLE) and my call took 8 mins 25 seconds total. Not too bad of an experience.

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I am incredibly annoyed with Apple about this same issue. I also switched to a Nexus 5.

I called the number you listed, and they confirmed that iMessage is already turned off for that number (which I did on my iPhone after switching to a Nexus 5 as well).

Most of my friends' iPhones will still send iMessages to me, and most of the time their phones don't even say delivery of the messages failed.

The tech support guy at 1-800-MY-APPLE told me that I should ask all of my friends to remove their existing text message threads with me from the messaging app. As the only proposed solution to my problem, this is already annoying enough. To make matters even worse, I just had one of my friends do exactly what they suggested, and his phone is STILL trying to send me iMessages.

It's unbelievable that Apple shows this little regard for their former customers. (Not to mention the fact that as an owner of several Apple products, I'm actually a current customer.)

Do you have another iOS device (iPad, perhaps) that uses the same iCloud account as your iPhone did?

No, not another iOS device.

If you have a recent Mac on 10.9 it tries to iMessage you there as well.

It's encouraging that they actually have the capability to fix the issue, but you really shouldn't have to call tech support to regain control of your phone number. When you sign up for iMessages they don't say "We take over your phone number and route all texts from iphones to it and you'll have to call tech support to make us stop!"

They do not have the ability to fix this. My wife's data plan is capped at 500MB and when it runs out iMessage does not work. She turned off iMessageing and days later when she still reported that she wasn't getting texts. The Apple tech said that she should tell people not to reply to a thread and to start a new one. She uses her phone for her business and she can't preemptively blast text over 150 contacts not to reply to an active thread, but to start a new one. Her iPhone contacts don't even understand the issue. Now she has to upgrade to an unlimited plan or risk missing messages. Apple has broken text messaging for anyone who uses an iPhone.

I have trouble sending texts from my iPhone to my wife after she switched from an iPhone to an Android. In my experience deleting old conversations and starting new ones didn't work. What does work is double-tapping a message after it has been sent, which gives you the option to send via SMS.

Useful to know! Double-tapping would be completely non-intuitive on a phone, how did you discover that?

double-tapping has the same effect as a long-press in this case. It brings up the contextual menu.

Oh of course, it's insanely annoying. It's not even something that crossed my mind since before transitioning to my iPhone I used to carry multiple phones on me and just switch SIMs around (I'm a mobile dev, not a drug dealer, I promise) I'm just saying that it's not hopeless, Apple hasn't done anything about it in years and from the blog it seems like the writer thinks they'll just never get text messages from iPhone users again, which is false.

From what I understand, it's less of a deliberate "HAHA SCREW YOU" and more of a caching issue on their iMessage registration side. The removal of my number took around 24 hours to propagate to their services (e.g. if a person who didn't have a thread with me put in my number, it would show green not blue) and I had to have some friends delete our chat history since my iMessage-ness was cached on their phone.

I think Apple only checks iMessage registration in pull format, e.g. when someone toggles iMessage on/off on their phone, rather than constantly checking it through some "does this phone have service" background test.

If it's not deliberate, then it's just incompetency.

How do you propose they fix it? Integrating with the infrastructure of every carrier to detect when a not-iPhone is activated on a line previously occupied by an iPhone is probably expensive and invasive to carriers.

Also you don't have to call tech support. You can deregister iMessage from Settings (by turning it off) before you activate a new phone.

iMessages go through Apple's servers, right? Then if all messages addressed to a particular phone suddenly stop being delivered, surely they can detect that. If a phone fails to check in for some period of time, there's a pretty good chance that the user has switched to a different device, and the messages should be retransmitted as SMS. Even if the timeout is on the order of days, that would still be better than having your messages swallowed by the void forever.

For bonus points, take care of false positives in this system by storing enough metadata in iMessage to deduplicate the iMessage and SMS copies.

That would mean that Apple have to pay for these SMS messages, which they probably don't want to do.

I don't think it does? The iMessage servers would simply reply to the sender device, saying "Number not active in iMessage", and give the sender a prompt to send by SMS.

The issue is a) communicating that to users. and b) Even if you know that, if your phone breaks and you revert to an older phone or a cheap android to tide you over... you didn't get a chance to sign out.

I'd say the problem is they're keeping you signed in for too long. If my phone doesn't check in for 24 hours, shouldn't it un-register me at least until I next check in?

It sounds like they're intentionally doing this, to create a problem for people migrating away from their service.

Apple: Broken by design, broken at inception.

> How do you propose they fix it?

Making it possible to deregister by logging into your Apple Account over the web would deal with 100% of the problem, which is people not being aware of the issue before switching off of iOS.

AFAIK this is already possibile

Edit: someone on this thread has confirmed

It's not obvious though. They give you a unified login - Apple ID - but all the services are all over the place. Other than iCloud, I can't tell you what URL to go to, to manage your ID, unregister devices etc. At least give us a portal with links to all the services.

How do you propose they fix it?

They could release an iMessage client for Android and PC.

> How do you propose they fix it?

It's their technology. Why should I provide the fix of a system that's not built by me, and have no control over it?

It's like saying, user x can't use a website, so he/sh should find out that there is a javascript error due to browser compatibility, and then the USER has to propose a solution with the fix in the javascript to the website owner.

Good implementations would not have these kind of issues. This is a technical afterthought to them since you cant be part of their Eco system without their hardware, apparently you can go screw yourself.

I suppose the question is, should you even have to do this?

Can't you assume that if a phone has iMessage open, you assume that number is active and poll to send keepalives. If the user has not opened iMessage for a while, you disassociate the number with iMesage. Before trying to send a message via iMessage, the server would check and reply if that user is still associated, if not the phone will fallback to SMS.

I previously just switched my SIM back into someone's iPhone and used toggled iMessage on and back off again before switching the SIM back again.

This is the proper response. I feel like the linked post is just a reason to bash Apple. As someone who used to work in their tech support (and has no real feeling about the company good or bad), EVERY time someone calls with this issue, it is fixed with the click of a button that deauthorizes their iMessage token.

I know a lot of people are saying that this shouldn't even have to be a step when you switch phones, but the fact is that you chose to use iMessage for the features. It could have been turned off at any time, they are not forcing you to use it.

It would be great if there was a way to fix this without having to call (or unregister your phone number from your apple id), because of not being able to know that it's happening. But it's not like Apple is deliberately trying to keep your messages hostage. Besides, you've already switched phones.

I wouldn't be so quick to say it's just an excuse to bash Apple. According to the writer's tweets Apple doesn't even see his phone number registered in the iMessage registry, so there could be something even worse going on here.

Source: https://twitter.com/adampash/status/466316191230087168

Ah, thank you for the link. I guess I was the one that was quick to judge.

It also just sounds like there was a bad experience with a particular tech support rep, who may be new. In my experience, these issues are ALWAYS exceptions to the $20 fee. If the 'standard' workarounds don't fix it, they will escalate you to a supervisor and put in a ticket with engineering who will resolve the issue within 48 hours.

Maybe OP will see this and give their tech support another shot. If not, the token expires in about 28 days.

*This information is less than a year old, but rules may have changed.

EVERY time someone calls with this issue, it is fixed with the click of a button that deauthorizes their iMessage token.

This is false. I just called 1-800-MY-APPLE (details in my reply to GP) and they said I had already deactivated iMessage for the number and that I needed to tell all of my friends to delete their existing threads with me. And then even that did not fix the problem.

I switched to a Nexus 5 recently. I deactivated iMessage, ensured my phone was no longer registered with Apple and asked friends to delete existing conversations.

It has been about a week and I still cannot receive text messages from iPhone users I've iMessaged in the past.

What is perhaps most frustrating is that Apple seems incapable of changing the situation. Adding insult to injury, Apple is requiring that I pay a $20 fee to speak with a technician.

In my case, my new number (for my android phone) is associated with someone else's iPhone. I could not de-authorize that person's iMessage token. I handpicked that number but had to give it up thanks to iMessage's implementation.

> Besides, you've already switched phones.

This does not follow.

If I change water providers, the previous water provider does have the right to stop me from receiving more water.

I would expect that the "totally wipe my phone" process would include an API call to Apple to disable iMessage for that phone so people don't have to make special calls.

Sounds like that doesn't happen.

Of course if you just throw the phone away without ever doing something to indicate it's no longer in use (to Apple, not your cell carrier) then the results are more sane. That can't happen to every one of these people though.

Not really -- it's a complex problem.

If my phone is stolen, so I wipe my phone via MDM. I still need to communicate, so I can use my Mac or iPad to do so transparently to the other parties.

This is a common issue whenever you do caching. Outlook fubars contacts whenever you migrate Exchange users to or from a system.

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