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

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.