4 ms·

What does Apple do with iMessage? I don't have an iPhone and always assumed it's just glorified SMS.

ratww 5y ago
iMessage is exclusive to iPhones and works in the same application that does SMS, seamlessly. The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that. It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.
- vdqtp3 5y ago
  Text messages between iPhones are also invisibly shunted to iMessage
- prionassembly 5y ago
  Should SMS cost money? (Or at least, more than ~10X the bandwidth bill so there's nice monopoly rent for the operator... I can't imagine the actual cost being over ~1 USD/1000 messages.)
  - ratww 5y ago
    It should be free, but spam should cost $5 per message.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  OP here. The problem I had was actually more referring to the fact that Apple does not offer fine grained control over how messages are delivered or sent on a per device basis. I can’t easily say, for instance, that I want outgoing messages on all my non phone devices (Mac, iPad, etc) to use iMessage but inbound messages sent from phones should be received via SMS. I also can’t say that I want all messages from certain users to be received via SMS (like my wife, who I should always want to receive on my phone so I can respond quickly).
andrewla 5y ago
When people with iPhones reply to someone who has switched away from Apple, and they use "Messages" (which does both iMessage and SMS) then there's a reasonable chance that the message will go into a black hole, where it will be delivered to iMessage and never appear on the other party's new phone. This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS. I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.

iMessage is exclusive to iPhones and works in the same application that does SMS, seamlessly. The problem OP is alluding to is that some people avoid talking with people who don’t have iMessage, because SMS costs money. So there is a bit of peer pressure to use it, and a lot of people are stuck in iOS because of that. It’s not that different from Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp, those apps are also closed and rely on network effects. But they are free and work on other OSs, while iMessage requires a relatively expensive phone.

vdqtp3 5y ago
Text messages between iPhones are also invisibly shunted to iMessage
prionassembly 5y ago
Should SMS cost money? (Or at least, more than ~10X the bandwidth bill so there's nice monopoly rent for the operator... I can't imagine the actual cost being over ~1 USD/1000 messages.)
- ratww 5y ago
  It should be free, but spam should cost $5 per message.
SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
OP here. The problem I had was actually more referring to the fact that Apple does not offer fine grained control over how messages are delivered or sent on a per device basis. I can’t easily say, for instance, that I want outgoing messages on all my non phone devices (Mac, iPad, etc) to use iMessage but inbound messages sent from phones should be received via SMS. I also can’t say that I want all messages from certain users to be received via SMS (like my wife, who I should always want to receive on my phone so I can respond quickly).

andrewla 5y ago

When people with iPhones reply to someone who has switched away from Apple, and they use "Messages" (which does both iMessage and SMS) then there's a reasonable chance that the message will go into a black hole, where it will be delivered to iMessage and never appear on the other party's new phone. This is doubly true if they have ever used an Apple PC to receive iMessages; in that case it will almost certainly never reach the new phone via SMS. I don't believe there is a fix to this; sometimes you can repair it on the other party's phone by munging the contact, but most messages will just be blackholed.

Jtsummers 5y ago
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203042 Two solutions. The first requires an iPhone (to disable iMessages on your account with) and the other does not. This has been around for years now.