iMessage purgatory
18 May 2014 • adampash.comI thought iMessage was pretty novel when Apple launched it. Providers were charging an absurd mark-up on SMS delivery, and the switch between iMessage and SMS was seamless enough to be almost invisible to the user, save the green vs. blue bubbles, which are in their own way a sort of weird social/status indicator (“omg why doesn’t Nathan have an iPhone?”).
But if it breaks, which it apparently has, it means Apple has crippled an entire medium for communication. Most of my friends have iPhones. My phone number hasn’t changed. But my number is now a black hole for text messages.
Not a problem I plan to have anytime soon (since I have no interest in a non-Apple phone), but probably an issue that deserves far more attention than it's getting. Seems like you'd simply update a database on Apple's end to say that you're phone number is no longer in the iMessage universe and allow the phone to fall back to plain SMS. I'm sure there are reasons it's more complex, but as a programmer with no inside knowledge it really sounds simple.