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This article is nothing more than bait for people who don't use an iPhone to think it's a dark-patterned nightmare. The "Professional Computers person" probabl

• stuaxo 3y ago
  This is nonsense - most people don't know the difference between imessages and SMS, it absolutely is surprising behaviour for the user that the messages now go to an app on her laptop that she may not even use.
  • jtc331 3y ago
    Maybe they don’t know all the intracies, but they certainly know the difference, that’s why there’s such a cultural big deal about blue versus green bubbles. Everybody knows when one person in a text group isn’t using iMessage, and they usually hate it.
    • Brian_K_White 3y ago
      Even I assumed imessage was just an SMS client until just now. You're saying it's not? And you're saying everyone knows this? I say incorrect. This is indeed totally surprising and inexplicable behavior.
      • jtc331 3y ago
        If people don’t know it (at some level like intuition), why is that everyone I know (including non-tech 55 year olds) see the green bubble and know the other person has android instead of an iPhone?
        • Brian_K_White 3y ago
          It just means the sms client can tell the difference. How exactly could be anything. They don't know enough to even know that this would require two seperate back-end services rather than the same back-end service with some optional extra special data added to the transaction. They don't even think of the words "client" or "back-end" or "transaction" like I just said. The fact that their iphone can tell that the other phone is not using imessage is not remarkable at all to them, or me for that matter.
          • jtc331 3y ago
            Sure, but by that (correct) reasoning the fact that it’s SMS (as a system) or some other system is similarly irrelevant to them and not the terms they think in.
            • Brian_K_White 3y ago
              Right. Another way I though to to say it is "What do you think the average person's concept is for how their phone knows a txt came from Bob vs Alice?" IE, how does my txt app know to display your phone number instead of some other phone number? Answer: "idk, tech magic." They know there is some way that isn't actually magic, they know there are mechanics, but they don't know or need to know what the mechanics are. How it knows to display a green bubble or a blue bubble is exactly like that. That's what I mean by it's not a remarkable thing to anyone that the txt app does this. Q: How? A: Somehow. They don't see it and think "Wow, this proves that there are two unrelated back-end systems."
      • jtc331 3y ago
        Indeed here’s the NYT bemoaning “green bubble shaming”: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/technology/personaltech/apple-iphone-android-bubbles.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/technology/personaltech/a...
  • quitit 3y ago
    Well she had to set it up on the laptop to work that way. It’s not automatic kiddo. Plus this is the sender writing a message to her email address. Her laptop didn’t steal her phone number.
• jtbayly 3y ago
  Bull. My sister switched to a dumb phone, and I couldn’t get my phone to text her anymore. I knew precisely what the problem was, as well as how to fix it, but it simply didn’t work half the time. It would just send a message to her computer that she might get a couple of days later.
  • tempodox 3y ago
    Messaging between an iPhone (with iMessage) and a dumb phone (with SMS) absolutely works, but Apple has no interest in showing you how to get out of the iMessage bubble (pun intended) once you're in. They want to pull you into their ecosystem because that makes them money but if you want out, you're on your own. Lots of companies behave like that, only consumer protection laws could force them to change.
  • quitit 3y ago
    What you’re describing isn’t even what the article is about. For your problem: users that haven’t deregistered their phone number from iMessage when switching to a non-Apple phone: there is the option of using a website to deregister, calling customer service, or simply waiting as iMessage will release registered numbers after a short period anyway.
    • bastawhiz 3y ago
      It's definitely about what the article is about. People fundamentally don't understand that iMessage is not vanilla texting. They know you send messages to phone numbers. The fact that you need to do a secret step to stop having your messages routed to a platform you don't use anymore is wild and unintuitive and plays directly into the argument that Apple/iMessage is abusing its market position.
      • quitit 3y ago
        Did you read the article?
        • 3y ago
• smlavine 3y ago
  The author is a woman, by the way.
• amluto 3y ago
  > It's also not some obscure hidden setting to choose a different delivery pathway in the Messages app: it's one button and the -only- option on the screen when choosing a recipient. Really? On iOS 17, when I choose a recipient in the Messages app, I can indeed select the dropdown and choose a phone number or email. I cannot choose a phone number that is associated with iMessage but ask for SMS. But it’s much worse than that. Once I select a phone number or email and start a conversation, it’s very difficult to tell which selection was made. (In fact, I’m not sure a reliable way to tell is wired into the UI at all.) In Apple’s very very slight defense, I don’t think this is an intentionally anticompetitive design. I think it’s merely a very poor design. I somewhat regularly have problems getting messages to work right even when all parties have iPhones. It’s damn near impossible to debug, and even fixing it once debugged is hard because you can’t change the settings after starting a conversation and because you can easily end up with multiple apparently identical simultaneously existing conversations, involving exactly the same contacts but different endpoints (emails/phones), some of which work and some of which don’t. And this happens even when literally every involved device is made by Apple, running the latest OS. iMessage’s user identifiers are just utterly crappy.
  • user_7832 3y ago
    What you talked about - iOS “hiding” stuff to make it simple, often at any/all cost(s), is IMO one of apple’s biggest engineering flaws. I’ve experienced numerous crashes and issues that would’ve at least given me an error code/message on windows, something I could debug or fix. This hiding is also why I think most iPhone users don’t understand the difference between iMessage and SMS.
• scintill76 3y ago
  > they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue Isn’t that an opt-in feature that would have to be enabled on the laptop, not by default?
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    Delivered is not opt-in, and in fact it isn’t even opt-out. Read receipts, on the other hand, are opt-in.
    • cozzyd 3y ago
      Sure but many people leave their computers on all the time, even if they're not with them.
• kixiQu 3y ago
  Hi, author here. (A woman.) I think a fair criticism of my post might be that it was written in a moment of obvious annoyance, and failed to spend enough time connecting the griping about the personal experience to larger problems, but it was definitely not "written to manipulate people into believing a false narrative." > the whole faux-drama would have been solved by simply turning off iMessage on his or his mother's device. We tried turning off iMessage on the laptop, as mentioned in the post. It does not revert other devices' behavior to SMS. > Which is false: the messages would be sent to her mac, and they'd be visible as unread to him, so he'd already see that there was an issue. She certainly won't receive them on her phone, no? It's bad enough, never mind that I'm not around to surveil her computer. > It's how a normal, not-tech savvy, person chooses a different phone number for a contact that has multiple phone numbers, and iMessage will remember that choice for the future. Unless, as here, the contact email becomes associated with something that supports iMessage, in which case Messages will stop using the chosen phone number. Neither of us have data to make an argument about how common it is for people to mess with this, so I can only note that I myself have never overridden the originally-chosen contact method before. Either way, there is no signal that someone might need to do this, since, as mentioned, the blue bubbles look to have been delivered just fine. > And if all of that is too hard, his mother could simply send him a message and the messages app will reply to her phone number, it won't auto switch to her email address. We tried this, and this is not the behavior we observed. Also, even if this had worked, she would have needed to quickly text... all of her contacts with iPhones in order to get them on the right pathway? Ultimately, if you think there's no problem here, that's your right. I chose not to include screenshots because a. that would have been more effort, and b. they'd have my mother's PII in them, and properly censoring that all out would have been even more effort. This whole situation is a PITA that I didn't intend to bring upon my family. The comments here evidence a divide between people thinking this behavior is obvious and people thinking it's highly non-obvious. That's interesting enough to me to feel it was worth having shared.
  • quitit 3y ago
    Hi author, sorry for referring to you as a male.