[bombcar]

This is the case, the telephone billing system is perhaps the most complicated pile of softwareshit you have ever seen in your LIFE - and some of it is insane.

There have been people who got printed bills from their cell phone provider for every single kilobyte of data, each individually indexed and billed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/300-page_iPhone_bill

[Spooky23]

When I was an intern, I was working for a big company on a project to optimize some call center management. Basically put mainframe reports on an intranet.

The company had made a change of some sort where whatever EDI connection between the telco and the company stopped working. I learned this when and angry facilities guy came up looking for my boss’s boss to sign for a delivery. I was the only person there, so I did. 15 minutes later, two pallets of bankers boxes came up - thousands of single sided pages of itemized call details.

[Scoundreller]

My favourite was getting charged for an sms my iPhone sent which was a phone home to an Apple headquarters short code for iMessage. iOS hides these from the user. Most providers don’t charge for this, but some do.

Really sucks when you carefully load 10 EUR of credit to buy a 10 EUR prepaid plan for the month and see 0,05 deducted despite being incredibly careful to not do anything that would incur a charge before buying the plan.

[csunbird]

Apple DOES say that, when you set up FaceTime and iMessage!

There is a pop up that says "Your carrier may charge for the messages used to activate iMessage and Facetime" You can choose to not activate and do it later.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

That warning did not appear in the early days.

[Nextgrid]

That warning actually depends on the “carrier profile”, a configuration file the phone silently fetches (or has cached in firmware builds) based on certain attributes of the SIM like the ICCID or MCC/MNC.

There’s a field in there that configured whether that warning should be shown.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Correct, and it didn't appear for carriers which were whitelisted (who zero-rated the iMessage activation SMS).

My memory, which may be wrong, is telling me that the first major version of iOS which included iMessage did not include the warning at all, and that it was added for non-whitelisted carriers (aka those which did not sell the iPhone) to prepare the user for the possibility that they will be billed, based on user feedback precisely like the comment to which I was replying.