> 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

> 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.