iMessage

[a_ukboy]

Just a quicky, when you send a text to another iOS 5 device it's sent as an iMessage, when it's gone and can't be delivered its sent as a text, hows this work exactly? Is it sent via text from your handset so comes out your allowance? Or does Apple convert it to text and sent from one of their servers, reason I asked is last week I was iMessage with my friend in Canada and 3 messages was sent as text, so they should be charged but however 1 week later and my account is still at £0.00 spend since last bill, so if the phone had sent the texts I should see charges!

[Ben]

I'm almost certain that the iPhone takes responsibility for resending the iMessage as a regular SMS message and therefore you will be charged for it. I don't believe Apple have the technology to provide their own SMS messaging service at the cost levels that would be necessary to support their user base without charging.

I can't explain your billing glitch, though! I'm sure it'll catch up to your account eventually ;)

[DaveC]

I don't believe Apple have the technology to provide their own SMS messaging service at the cost levels that would be necessary to support their user base without charging.



I'm sure they don't but it is possible. Google send me several SMS messages a week as calendar reminders. There are a heck of a lot more Google users than users of i devices.

[Ben]

I'm sure they don't but it is possible. Google send me several SMS messages a week as calendar reminders. There are a heck of a lot more Google users than users of i devices.
It's very unlikely. Google can offer an SMS service on Calendars because the only number(s) receiving the alerts are the ones you specify. Providing P2P SMS is incredibly difficult, demanding things like local timestamp support on the SMS message, a correctly formatted numeric sender ID to emulate the message being sent from the senders own mobile network, support for numbers that are ported and/or roaming. It just wouldn't make sense. Much more likely that the handset times out the iMessage attempt and resends as SMS.

[DaveC]

You've also forgot to mention that Apple also like to stash their cash under the bed.

[DBMandrake]

I can send an SMS message to a phone from Skype with a phone number as the "apparent" sender, so why couldn't Apple do it ?

[Ben]

They can, they just have absolutely no reason to go to all that trouble when the phone can resend the message via the customer's own rate plan.

A way to test this might be to send another message to the recipient in iMessage, ensuring that they are offline. Then put the handset into airplane mode and see if the resend as SMS happens server-side. If it does, Apple are sending texts, which is interesting because it suggests they're going to use SMS for a great deal more if they've gone to the trouble of sending SMS at all. If it doesn't, it's the handset resending the message, and it won't be going via Apple.

[The Mullet of G]

Apple need to stop using the slogan "It just works" as it really doesn't apply to them anymore. So far iMessage has been hilariously bad, I can be sitting right next to someone sharing the same WiFi hotspot, both with good signal from both network and WiFi and iMessage still fails and sends the text via the traditional method.

Home Sharing and WiFi sync fall into the same category of "great idea, horrible execution" WiFi Sync has the exact same bugs as the version found on Cydia well over a year before iOS5 was released.

Apple its seems are still good at making things shiny, but not so good at actually making things that work. :)

[miffed]

Hey welcome back Mullet me old mucker !

[The Mullet of G]

Hey there bud. Thought I'd stop by and spread some Xmas cheer. :D

[Ben]

Ha, indeed, welcome back ;)

Bar a couple of occasions where iMessage seems to have been genuinely 'down', I've not been able to pin the not-infrequent resending-as-texts down to flaws in the service rather than poor data connectivity at this time. I suppose all sorts of stuff can interfere with it. Thank **** Apple implemented the SMS-resend stuff, normally Apple v1 stuff would've skipped such niceties!

Home Sharing is duff, though. I have no end of problems with my Apple TV seeing my iTunes and vice versa, and don't even go there with Remote.app! There's a new Apple TV update out today which brings bug fixes, I'm hoping that improves things as it has been getting steadily better. I hope so anyway, apparently Apple have been quietly shifting millions of the things! When it works it's awesome, when it doesn't... rawr.

[miffed]

Ha, indeed, welcome back ;)


Home Sharing is duff, though. I have no end of problems with my Apple TV seeing my iTunes and vice versa, and don't even go there with Remote.app! There's a new Apple TV update out today which brings bug fixes, I'm hoping that improves things as it has been getting steadily better. I hope so anyway, apparently Apple have been quietly shifting millions of the things! When it works it's awesome, when it doesn't... rawr.

Really ? I've had no problems at all ! the only "problem" is that my laptop and iMac both have the same name (i.e. Miffed's library ) ....but thats my own silly fault , I've had no problems connecting , I use the remote app on the iPhone all the time and it always connects first time , could the problems be router influenced ?

[The Mullet of G]

Ha, indeed, welcome back ;)

Bar a couple of occasions where iMessage seems to have been genuinely 'down', I've not been able to pin the not-infrequent resending-as-texts down to flaws in the service rather than poor data connectivity at this time. I suppose all sorts of stuff can interfere with it. Thank **** Apple implemented the SMS-resend stuff, normally Apple v1 stuff would've skipped such niceties!

Home Sharing is duff, though. I have no end of problems with my Apple TV seeing my iTunes and vice versa, and don't even go there with Remote.app! There's a new Apple TV update out today which brings bug fixes, I'm hoping that improves things as it has been getting steadily better. I hope so anyway, apparently Apple have been quietly shifting millions of the things! When it works it's awesome, when it doesn't... rawr.


I'm starting to think Apple made a compromise with the network providers to bounce 30-40% of iMessages via the traditional method, thus still giving them a slice of the pie. :D

Home Sharing is frustratingly duff, it works sometimes then other times completely fails, then works again without anything having been done that could have fixed it.

[hecatae]

Stolen, remote-wiped iPhones still get owner's iMessages

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/imessage_persistant/

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/12/stolen-iphone-your-imessages-may-still-be-going-to-the-wrong-place.ars

Hovis iMessaged back and forth with the new owner—his iMessages, incidentally, going to both his wife's new phone and the old phone at the same time—but the new owner came off as confused and uncooperative, and the whole situation seemed to be at a dead end. That's when Hovis began searching online, discovering that such a thing has happened to other iPhone users as well.

[The Mullet of G]

Stolen, remote-wiped iPhones still get owner's iMessages

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/imessage_persistant/

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/12/stolen-iphone-your-imessages-may-still-be-going-to-the-wrong-place.ars

Hovis iMessaged back and forth with the new owner—his iMessages, incidentally, going to both his wife's new phone and the old phone at the same time—but the new owner came off as confused and uncooperative, and the whole situation seemed to be at a dead end. That's when Hovis began searching online, discovering that such a thing has happened to other iPhone users as well.

Hovis sounds like a bit of a loaf. :)

I've been following the iMessage thing, and its a bit of a howler to be fair. I'm not sure I agree with the security experts theory about the iPhone caching the phone number from the SIM, I suspect on some level there is a hardware identifier that ties the iPhone and iMessage together, when the old device is wiped and a new device added iMessage should update to reflect this and should only ever be linked to one device, but instead its simply adding the new device to the list, in theory you could probably do this a number of times and it would send the same iMessage to several phones. Apple have been suspiciously slow to respond to this issue, which makes me think that the issue is caused by the way iMessage works, and fixing it might require a bit of a rethink.

Hopefully they fix it pretty soon, as I'm about to sell my iPhone 4 and would rather the new owner wasn't privy to my iMessages. :)

[Hands0n]

I set up iMessage on the iPhone (4) and my iPad jointly. The iMessage is tied to the Apple ID. I wonder if Hovis didn't sign out of iMessage with his old iPhone before selling it.

This is just an extension of what people don't do with their laptops and computers when they sell them. That is, to clear them down and/or remove data. An old buddy of mine buys broken laptops off eBay and the like, repairs them and sells them on for a tidy profit. His best anecdote is of a lappy he bought from a young lady (as he was later to find out). Having repaired it [a simple fault] he found all of her content on the hard drive. In the Pictures directory there was a very graphic and gynaecological set showing off what she could do with a can of Coke! Eeeeuuuwwww.

I've had several 2nd user featurephones and smartphones with the content left on or accounts left logged in. Nothing quite as epic as the above, thankfully.

[miffed]

^^ I think he had it stolen and "remote wiped"

[hecatae]

^^ I think he had it stolen and "remote wiped"

exactly, stlen and remote wiped but still receiving imessages intended for the original owner

[Hands0n]

Well that makes the Remote Wipe virtually useless! Missed a big one there!!

[Ben]

It does sound like devices aren't being properly unsubscribed from iMessage. A bit like if a device isn't properly unsubscribed from push notifications. But this is a little more sensitive of course... it's definitely an issue that Apple should be addressing. Not too complicated to fix I wouldn't have thought, but it may take a modification of the protocol to introduce the necessary safeguards.

One to watch!

[Hands0n]

I have to wonder how quickly, if at all, Apple will respond now that The Steve has gone. This is a serious loophole in security that may damage the iPhone's image with Enterprise and Government agencies. If I were Apple I'd have a statement out and a fix in the pipeline.

[Ben]

To be fair Mr. Jobs wasn't renowned for being first off the line when it came to addressing concerns. I think Cook is more likely to react to such concerns; look at the rapid response on CarrierIQ.