4 ms·

The Failure of iMessages

3 points by dr3wster 15y ago

ddagradi 15y ago
> Sending a text to either contact would get to her iPhone 4S, but the phone number contact would send an SMS, and the e-mail address would send as an iMessage. Nope. Phone numbers also receive iMessages just fine.
- dr3wster 15y ago
  Yes, that's how it works with the rest of my contacts, but for this one for some reason she had an exclusive SMS contact and a separate iMessage contact. The iMessage contact was associated with an email address and SMS contact was associated with a phone number.
  - ddagradi 15y ago
    Ah. That's her configuration choice then.
  - jgeorge 15y ago
    That's quite possible (and not a bug) if she has more than one device - iMessage disabled on the phone (which would force phone number messages to be SMS) but the email address turned on for iMessage on another device. I had my iPhone/iPad set this way for a while to allow me to send messages from either device without getting replies back to both devices.
    - dr3wster 15y ago
      That actually sort of makes sense, although I also have an iPad and used to use it for iMessages occasionally. But no one has had a similar issue with me as a contact (I've checked). Edit: also I've checked with her and she has iMessages enabled on every iDevice she owns.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jgavris 15y ago
to be fair, distributed consensus is essentially impossible. iMessage is definitely an improvement on SMS, though. read up on the 'two generals problem' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem "Because acknowledgement of message receipt can be lost as easily as the original message, a potentially infinite series of messages is required to come to consensus."
- dr3wster 15y ago
  This is very true, but my main issue was my phone receiving a delivery confirmation when the recipient never actually received the message. That seems like unacceptable behavior to me. Assuming the messages are IDed in some way, why can't phone A just keep sending message 1 to phone B until it receives a confirmation for message 1 from phone B? And phone B can just ignore any duplicate message 1's and send back confirmations for them anyway. Obviously this becomes a very complex problem over a large scale, but I feel like Apple can do better than this.
  - jgavris 15y ago
    I would be very disappointed to be able to recreate the scenario you describe. 'Delivered' should mean that the distributed transaction was 'committed', aka Alice has committed Bob's message :)

3 points by dr3wster 15y ago

> Sending a text to either contact would get to her iPhone 4S, but the phone number contact would send an SMS, and the e-mail address would send as an iMessage. Nope. Phone numbers also receive iMessages just fine.

dr3wster 15y ago
Yes, that's how it works with the rest of my contacts, but for this one for some reason she had an exclusive SMS contact and a separate iMessage contact. The iMessage contact was associated with an email address and SMS contact was associated with a phone number.
- ddagradi 15y ago
  Ah. That's her configuration choice then.
- jgeorge 15y ago
  That's quite possible (and not a bug) if she has more than one device - iMessage disabled on the phone (which would force phone number messages to be SMS) but the email address turned on for iMessage on another device. I had my iPhone/iPad set this way for a while to allow me to send messages from either device without getting replies back to both devices.
  - dr3wster 15y ago
    That actually sort of makes sense, although I also have an iPad and used to use it for iMessages occasionally. But no one has had a similar issue with me as a contact (I've checked). Edit: also I've checked with her and she has iMessages enabled on every iDevice she owns.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jgavris 15y ago

to be fair, distributed consensus is essentially impossible. iMessage is definitely an improvement on SMS, though. read up on the 'two generals problem' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem "Because acknowledgement of message receipt can be lost as easily as the original message, a potentially infinite series of messages is required to come to consensus."

dr3wster 15y ago
This is very true, but my main issue was my phone receiving a delivery confirmation when the recipient never actually received the message. That seems like unacceptable behavior to me. Assuming the messages are IDed in some way, why can't phone A just keep sending message 1 to phone B until it receives a confirmation for message 1 from phone B? And phone B can just ignore any duplicate message 1's and send back confirmations for them anyway. Obviously this becomes a very complex problem over a large scale, but I feel like Apple can do better than this.
- jgavris 15y ago
  I would be very disappointed to be able to recreate the scenario you describe. 'Delivered' should mean that the distributed transaction was 'committed', aka Alice has committed Bob's message :)